
Class ^JljLfl3_ 
Book ^)f_ 
Gop>TightN° 

COPYKIGHT DEPOSIT. 






For private circulation only. 



r 



AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



n 



OUT WAYNE. INDIANA. 



BRANCH OF THE 



NATIONAL LAND LEAGUE- 



IRELAND, 



ST. PATRICK'S DAY, 1881, 

BY THE 

EON. EDMUND K. DTTNNE, LL. D. 

Ex-Chief Justice of Arizona. 



CHICAGO: 

W. ROTII, PRINTER, 171 HAXDOI.PI1 STREET. 
1881. 



Entered according to Vet of Congress In the year 1881, b^ K F. Dnnno, in the office of the 
Librarian of Congress al Washington. 






Co 






IRELAND. 



RIGHTS, WRONGS AND REMEDIES. 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: 

I have come before you to-night to try to say something about Ire- 
land. I know there are many here to whom I can impart no informa- 
tion on that subject. I am sure there are many here who were born in 
Ireland, and who remember the abode where, in the land beyond the 
sea, they passed the happy days of childhood, the verdant hedge, the 
smooth, white roads, the bubbling spring, the running brooks, and the 
larger streams where the trout and salmon play ; the magic lakes, the 
mossy ruins, the forts and raths,the holy wells and ancient towers and all 
that sheds an ever living halo of beauty around the hallowed spot which 
first received the sacred name of home. 

I doubt not, also, that some are here who remember the day when, 
instead of seeing one of these happy homes, they saw. fortunate if it 
was not their own. the blazing thatch, the tumbled wall, the blackened 
ruin, telling of misfortune, eviction, emigration and death. 

1 can have but small hope of interesting such persons by way of 
imparting information, but it may please them to witness this assem- 
blage, to see by the gathering of their descendants here that the child- 
ren have not forgotten the story of their fathers' wrongs ; that even in 
this far off land the old traditions are still preserved ; the old recollec- 
tions fondly cherished; the old rights rigidly claimed, the new remedies 
carefully considered, and that millions of young Irish-Americans are 
ready and anxious to hold np to England's lip the fatal cup which their 
fathers in former days were forced to drain to the last bitter drop of 
despair. 

To my young Irish- American friends, 1 address myself with more 



(2) 

of confidence. The field of research in Irish matters is so vast, and a 
meeting such as tills is so much like an assembling to hear the report 
of a traveller, returned from an interesting land, that however indiffer- 
ent an observer I may have been, I can hardly fail to bring back some 
gleanings of information to which they will accord, I hope a not un- 
welcome reception. 

I know, also, that speaking on this subject, at this time, in this 
country, it is more than likely that some Americans, not of Irish de- 
scent, will honor me with their attention, and I will therefore try to 
make some matters intelligible to them which Irishmen, alas ! under- 
stand only too well, without present explanation. 

Tenant Right in Ireland. 

No one can understand the situation of things in Ireland without 
first learning something about the land question there, and recognizing 
that there is not only a peculiar feeling in Ireland about tenancy, 
but that Irish tenancy itself is not only unlike anything ever known in 
this country, but different probablyfrom anything now known in any 
country in the world. 

In this country, a man hires a piece of land and uses it for his 
purpose the same as he hires anything else for use. When his lease is 
out, he hires it again or not as he feels inclined. There is no attach- 
ment to the land itself, merely as land, A farm here or a farm there, 
is simply land, and nothing more. He has rarely held it long enough 
to have acquired any particular affection for it, except possibly as a 
good place to make money on. In England a tenant has all of this 
feeling for his holding, with the further feeling often, that he was born 
on that particular land and his fathers and grandfathers for genera 
tions before him, but all of them recognizing the ownership of the land 
as being in some one else. 

There is another class of tenancies where one who once was owner 
became impoverished and, ceasing to be owner, remains as a tenant. 
Such a tenant, though he may repine at his fate, does not blame his 
landlord for claiming the land. The tenant knows that his landlord 
has bought it for a price, acquiring title by fair and honorable means, 
and that he is warranted in holding and claiming it as his own. 

There is another class of tenancies where one who once was owner 



(3) 

is despoiled of his lands by the strong arm of an invader or by what he 
calls unjust act of law; confiscation, attainder, outlawry, &c, and yet 
L8 l»'l'i upon the land and consents to be a tenant. This situation is gen- 
eral} understood as being the case, with Irish farmers, and Americans 
say it is folly for Irish people to claim now that they have, at this pre- 
sent day, any interest in the land other than a mere tenancy like a ten- 
ancy anywhere else; they say the Irish people were conquered long 
ago, their lands taken from them, and though it may have been wrong 
to do so, it has been done, and rights of property have grown up under 
the new arrangement which have to be respected, and that the action 
of the present land league, although they may not very loudly con- 
demn it, is, strictly speaking, a kind of lynch law. This I take it is 
what Americans say or think about the matter, yet not a single one 
of these various instances of tenancy is anything like the tenancy to 
which Irish fanners have been accustomed until a comparatively recent 
day 

To exercise the traditional privilege, in speaking of Irish matters, 
we may say that Ireland, was one of those queer places where the land- 
lord did not own the land, where he whom we would call the landlord 
was not recognized in law as having any special interest in the land 
used by the tenant, and where he, whom we would call the tenant, was 
really the owner of the soil he cultivated, so far as anybody owned it, 
and where he, whom we would call the landlord, so far as he had a 
special interest in any particular land, was really a tenant at will of 
those whom we would naturally call his tenants. This statement may 
soem a little, or indeed very much confused, yet I think I can show 
you in a very few words that it is a tolerably exact statement, even from 
a legal point of view. 

You all know that scoiety is not every where organized in the par- 
ticular form in which it now exists generally in the United States; you 
know that every separate nation has a social organization peculiar to 
itself in many things. In regard to land forinstance; in the United 
States one may will his land to any one he pleases, to the exclusion of 
all his children; in England, as to some estates, it mnst all go to the 
eldest son, in Prance it must all go to all the children equally, sons and 
daughters ; in some countries it must all go to the youngest son, in some 



(4) 

countries it must go to the daughters; in some countries it must all go 
to the sovereign, and in some countries the wife and children go with 
it, to the king, as much his absolute property as the land itself. So you 
see the right which a man may have in land is not the same in all coun- 
tries. 

I could multiply instances of the different principles on which dif- 
ferent social organizations are put together in the matter of marriage, 
military service, personal liberty, and so on, but I have cited enough to 
show what I mean. When we sr>eak therefore of the principles on 
which society is organized we mean the system adhered to by the peo- 
ple as to any or all these matters, the general scheme on which the peo- 
ple have consented to live together. 

In Ireland there was no individual ownership of particular land in 
the absolute sense which now obtains here. Society there was not 
organized on the principle of the family unit as we understand the 
word family here. With us the family is the unit, but family means 
with us a man, wife and children, and the man is the head of the 
family and the result of the labor of the wife and children in building 
up a property is all consolidated in his hands, and justly or unjustly 
is held by him to dispose of as he pleases. 

In Ireland the family was also recognized as the unit of society, but 
family there meant, in this sense, something very different from what 
it now means with us. 

In Ireland the term family as a legal unit, was taken in the patri- 
archal sense, meaning the head of a famil}- with all the existing 
descendants, all of the same name and blood, and often numbering 
thousands of persons. All of these bore the same name, as, O'Neill, 
O'Brien, &<•., but the chief or head of the family was called The 
O'Neill, or The O'Brien, as being Hie O'Neill or tlie O'Brien, who ruled 
and who acted for the family in dealing with strangers, and this distinc- 
tion is preserved in many instances to the present day, as may be seen 
by the names of present and recent Irish Members of Parliament, who 
are officially known now, not as John or James O'Donoghue or Patrick 
or Michael O'Conor, but as The O'Donoghue, The O'Oonor Don, &c. 
About the time of the English occupation there were some 180 of these 
organized families in Ireland. Each family had its own particular 



(5) 

territory, witli boundaries as carefully defined as those of the counties 
of your Stale at the present day. A family of this kind was called a 
sept from an Irish word meaning, clan, race, or tribe. The territory 
belonging to the s< pt was called the country of the tribe, as O'Hanlon's 
country (fee. The land was considered the common property of the 
tribe, and different portions of it were assigned to the members thereof 
under direction of the chief, but according to w T ell established laws and 
usages. Among the thousands of people living in one of these countries 
there were always a great number of wanderers, and,some times, outlaws 
from other tribes, also man} 7 who were laborers, not entitled to use of 
the land, directly, on their own account. None but those who belonged 
to the tribe were entitled to tribe land, and they were entitled in pro- 
portions accoiding to their antiquity in the sept, and therefore the 
proofs of descent and relationship were preseived in writing as care- 
fully as we now preserve our records of title to lands, and for the same 
purpose, that of establishing right of possession to land. Also, every 
one belonging to the family of the chief was eligible to the succession 
ot the headship by vote of the sept, so that a special record of relation- 
ship was preserved with more than religious caie, which explains why 
it is that numberless Irish families of the present day, who do not own 
a foot of land any where in the world, have pedigrees, older and better 
attested than those of heads of royal houses in other countries. There 
are twenty million acres of land in Ireland; divided among these 180 
septs it would average more than 100,000 acres to each sept. The head 
of the organization occupying one of these countries was called Lord of 
the country, as Lord of Ily-many etc., sometimes he was called prince, 
as Prince of Coolavin, a title inherited, borne and recognized down to 
our own days. This Lord of a country, apportioned the lands among 
the members of (he tribe and received a tribute from them, and would 
therefore naturally be railed the landlord, and they, his tenants, but, as 
I said a little while ago this Lord did not own the land; he had no 
special interest in the lands used by the holder of the soil. The soil 
belonged to the tribe, as a community, and the so called tenant held 
the land in his own right, as a member of the tribe. Now to explain the 
apparenl paradox 1 put. that the landlord, so far as he had a special 
interest in any particular land, was really as to that land, a tenant at 



(6) 

will of those whom we would naturally call his tenants. The members 
of the Irish septs had a royal regard for the person, the honor and the 
dignity of their chief. That he might sustain that dignity in a 
becoming manner they assigned to him certain lands for the mainten- 
ance and support in princely style of himself and his family. So jealous 
were they of his maintaining a proper show of authority, that it was a 
part of the written law, that he should never appear in public without 
a retinue, and the penalty for disregarding this law was, deprivation of 
his rank. He was obliged to maintain a bard to chant the glories of 
the tribe; a chronicler to record its actions; a brehon or chancellor, to 
expound the law; various officers to preserve the pedigrees of the 
clan, and a certain number of mounted men, knights in waiting, in 
fact, whatever they may be called in name. To maintain all this state 
and meet all this expense, a large part of the lands of the tribe were 
necessarily assigned to him, but as to those lands it is easy to see that 
he held them really as a tenant from the tribe. The members of the 
tribe also paid to the chief a certain annual tribute, proportioned to 
their holdings, not of land alone but of other property, cattle &c. all 
of which was protected by the chief and his warrior band. So that this 
tribute was not paid as rent of land, but contributed as a tax, to pro- 
vide means of protection. The farmers were no more tenants of the 
lord because they paid this tax, to support the organization than 
owners of land here are tenants, because they pay an annual tax to the 
State. The lord was, as to his lands, a tenant at will of the tribe, 
because he held those lands by virtue of being chief, and he held his 
position as chief at the will of the tribe, and many a time in Irish history 
did a tribe depose its chief and put another in his place, always how- 
ever, some other person of the family of the chief. The lord of the 
territory was recognized as having the right to levy special tribute at 
his pleasure for such purposes as he thought proper, new castles, par- 
ticular displays and the like, and so willing were they to obey the 
chief that even extraordinary tributes were generally paid, which fact, 
if remembered, will explain something 1 may speak of further on. 

This system of occupying the land was in force in Ireland for more 
than a thousand years, under a body of written laws, voluminous and 
minute almost beyond conception. 



(?) 

These facts as to the manner in which such farmers occupied their 
lands foi many centuries, make intelligible the remark once made in the 
London Times, never a friend of Ireland, in accounting to its readers 
for t lie strange exhibition of bold defiance on the part of Irish farmers, 
that these 1 Irish, so-called, tenants, were not and never had been peas- 
ants in the continental sense, but were and always had been gentlemen 
as the word gentlemen is understood in England, that is, that under 
their own government they had occupied their lands not by permission 
of some present or absent lord, but by absolute right as themselves, 
lords of the soil, and had therefore all the natural boldness which 
personal independence breeds and confirms. 

This also explains why Irishmen in Ireland lived for generation 
after generation in one certain place, each one dwelling in his own ter- 
ritory, because, to leave his territory was to separate himself from his 
tribe, with small chance of acquiring anything like equal social stand- 
ing in any other tribe. 

It also explains their powerful attachment not to land in general 
but to the lands of their particular territory. They will make unheard 
of sacrifices to retain the land which has been in their families for un- 
numbered generations, but once uproot them from that, and set them 
adrift in the world, and they have no more affection for mere land than 
is possessed by men in general, and this answers the question, so often 
asked, " Why is it that Irishmen, so furious to possess the soil in their 
own eonntry, when they come to America care but little to go on the 
land?" 

It also explains why there is a peculiar attraction for them to re- 
main in the great cities of this country, because, there they meet with 
fellow-men of their sept, fellow exiles in a land of strangers, and, 
ofcourse.it is pleasanter to remain there, where they can meet and 
talk together of the old times at home, and consult as to how they may 
come to their own again, rather than to strike out separately for a lone- 
ly life in the wilds of the west. 

It explains, too, why being thus gathered together, broken in for- 
tune, adrift in a foreign land, everything new and strange to them, 
they are led into some excesses which were never particularly charac- 
teristic of them at home, and which are often a clog to their advance- 
ment here. 



(8) 

It explains, too, why the late scheme of colonization by them in 
organized bodies, so that they may be on thelandand still be together? 
and within sound of their pastor's voice is having such a great suc- 
cess. 

It explains, too, why the history of Ireland shows so much in- 
ternal conflict, so different from that of other nations. It was in fact 
an aggregation of small separate nations, each one outgrowing its 
boundaries, always crowding upon, and often trespassing upon those 
adjoining. 

It explains also a certain difficulty there has always been exper- 
ienced in getting Irishmen to act together harmoniously as a whole. 
They were never organized as a nation in anything like the way in 
which modern nations are organized. The individual members of a 
tribe practically never recognized any authority but that of their chief. 
They tilled their lands or went forth to battle just as their chief direct- 
ed, and whenever the Chief said, " Let's go home," home they went. 

When a number of Irishmen are assembled in this country, and 
someone undertakes to direct their action, the slightest sign of de- 
cision of character on his partis often looked upon as an assumption 
by him of the power of a chief giving command to his clan, and as his 
audience is made up, not of men of his tribe, but of representatives of 
many tribes, there are sure to be some persons present who, feeling 
they are chiefs in their own right, rebel at once from such, as they 
think, attempted control, so that it is almost a proverb now that where 
two Irishmen are found three of them want to be boss. 

They will, however, gradually outgrow all of this quality which is 
seriously objectionable. A proper amount of individual independence 
is, in this country, desirable, rather than otherwise. 

Ireland was divided into four provinces, each one having its king. 
The chiefs recognized no authority directly, except that of their pro- 
vincial king. Of course, the provincial king was guided in his policy 
mainly by the advice of the more powerful chiefs. Here again was 
cause of internal war on account of conflict of interests of these 
several provinces. such as even calmer blood than the Celtic, would not 
have been able to always avoid, and which was exactly paralelled 
among the supposed colder-blooded Anglo-Saxons, in the days of the 



Heptarchy, when they had seven provinces, each with its own king, just 
:is in Ireland. 

These- four provinces yielded a certain amount of allegiance to a 
supreme king,oalled always the Monarch of Ireland, and they set apart 
a certain amount of land from each province, at the point where the 
four provinces joined in the centre of the island, for the Monarch's use, 
called the ancient Province of Meath, now divided into East and West 
Meath. The provincial kings paid tribute to the monarch, the same as 
the members of a tribe did to their chief. 

This is the system that was in vogue for at least a thousand years, 
when the English began to come into the country in 1172. Now we are 
coming near the time of the confiscations. But it was not at this time 
that the Irish farmers began to have Trouble about their lands. When 
a hurricane sweep across a country, it is the tall and spreading trees 
which fust sutler from the blast; the humbler plants which throve be- 
neath their shelter remain for a while undisturbed. The great chiefs 
who led the opposing hosts against the invader, and lost, were 
the ones who suffered first. Their possessions were taken and the Eng- 
lish lords put in their place, but the so called tenants were not disturb- 
e 1 except, t.j s >me< x ent, within the area of the English pale. Neither 
was their right in the land, as they claimed it, questioned. The new 
English lords outside the pale had neither power nor inclination to in- 
troduce the English system of rent paying. They preferred the larger 
power of the Irish chiefs, under Irish law, to levy tribute when they 
liked, and many of them assumed Irish manners and Irish dress in 
order to cause themselves to be more fully accepted as successors to the 
Irish chiefs, and this was one cause why English laws were made for- 
bidding the adoption of Irish customs by English settlers. 

Irish chiefs were invited by the English government to surrender 
their Irish titles, both titles of nobility and titles to land, and take in 
exchange English titles both of land and nobility. Some of them did 
so, but were often compelled by the people to disclaim the English 
title of nobility and be known only as of old,as Lords of Irish countries 
or Chiefs of Irish septs. 

In considering the matter of the difficulty there was in establishing 
English laws and customs in Ireland, it should be remembered that they 



(10) 

were not only customs foreign to and radically different from those 
established in Ireland from time immemorial, but that they were also the 
customs of a conqueror and therefore especially odious for that if for 
no other reason, being thereby a badge of servitude; also that the Irish 
were a different race from the English, as different from them as the 
French are from the Germans; also that they differed in language; the 
Irish language differing not only from the English more than the 
French does from the German, but differing radically from all other 
languages now spoken. The Irish people would not try to learn Eng- 
lish and to this day in many parts of Ireland, English is,to many Irish 
people, a foreign and unintelligible tongue. Americans notice a pecu- 
liar oddity in the speech of many Irishmen in talking English. This 
does not consists so much in the so called brogue as in the fact that 
these men are simply putting English words together according to the 
Irish mode of constructing a sentence. 

In must be remembered also that the language so cherished by the 
Irish people was not an unwritten patois, but was an inflected, original 
language, of higher grade than the English language of even the pre- 
sent day, and that it had been the language of poetry, philosopln- and 
history in Ireland, a thousand years before the father of English poetry 
penned the lines which not one in a thousand now can read. 

For three hundred years after the so called English conquest of 
Ireland, that is from 1172 to 1603, the lands of Ireland were held in ac- 
cordance with the old Irish laws. Under James I, shortl}* after 1G03, 
an attempt was made to to introduce the English system of holding- 
land. In changing the tenure, three inquiries were made; first, how 
much of the estate was held by the Irish chief as reserved for his own 
use: second, how much was held by the so-called tenants; third, what 
was the yearly value in money of the tributes paid by the so called 
tenants to the chief. These three points being settled, the lands held 
by the chiefs were granted to the landlord outright, but the lands held 
by the so-called tenant were not taken from the tenant, that is,7iis owner- 
ship of them was not questioned, but an estimate was made of what the 
various tributes which the chief might exact during the year would be 
worth in money, and the occupant was adjudged to pay that amount 
in monev annually to the new lord Be it remembered that the new lord 



(11) 

was imt necessarily an Englishman, nor even a new man. What. Eng- 
land was trying to do at this time was to break up the Irish system of 
Uolding lands, and substitute for it as near an approach as possible to 
the English system. To get this system adopted very great induce- 
ments were offered t.<> the Irish chiefs, such as before stated, namely, 
not only an English title to their lands bul also an English title of nobil- 
ity. The English authorities had many objects in trying to introduce 
this policy. First, they wished to break up the Irish tribal system 
so as to break the power of the chiefs; second, they were willing-, for 
that purpose and at that time, to recognize the right of the, so-called, 
tenant farmers but in reality farmer owners, and guarantee their inde- 
pendence of the chief, so that they would not feel under any obligation 
to take up arms with him at his bidding; third, they wished to get the 
chiefs in their power by getting them to take a British title and 
acknowledge British allegiance, so that on the slightest sign of disloy- 
alty they could confiscate their lands; fourth, they wished to thus pave 
the way for an English occupation of the land, and finally every intro- 
duction ot British Law of any kind in place of an Irish law on the same 
subject was a gain to that extent in anglicising Ireland. 

I wish to emphasize the fact that the sum of money the farmer 
owners ot the small holdings were to annually pay was not considered 
a rent of land, for, their ownership of that was recognized, and the tribute 
was assessed on cattle as well as land, but it was simply a commuta- 
tion of an ancient tribute and reducing to a sum certain what was be- 
fore an uncertain tax. Be it remembered that when the settlement was 
made from 1603 to 1(541, whenever a change was made by an Irish sept 
submitting to English authority, the English government did not grant 
to the new loid all the territory formerly held by the sept, and leave 
the people as tenants of the lord, but an actual survey was made of 
the territory, the portion found in possession of the lord or chief as 
his own particular land, and that only, was mapped out, as the new- 
lord's land, and a grant was made him of that and only that land, except 
there was added to it a right to collect from the occupants of other 
land of the territory an annual payment, not as rent of land belonging 
to the lord but as a commutation of an ancient tribute. 

This explains why the landlord in Ireland never makes any improve- 



la- 
ments on the lands of his so-called tenants. He never thought of do- 
ing so in the first instance, nor did any one expect him to do it, for it 
was well known that he was not the owner of the land and had no right 
to enter upon it forany purpose except to collect, not his rent, but his 
tribute. 

Then came the rebellion of 1041 and the Cromwellian settlement, 
with a paper confiscation of all Irish rights in land. This confisca- 
tion became a reality as to all the Irish chiefs, but never became an 
actual fact as to the mass of the people. The chiefs and their families 
were scattered to the four quarters of the globe, some to die in exile 
broken in heart and health and spirit, others to mount to the highest 
pinnacle of fame in the countries of their adoption. The mass of the 
people in spite of the paper decree still retained their ancient hold- 
ings, but with this difference, that the landlords now began to disre- 
gard the tenant's rights. The old chiefs with their warrior retinues 
were gone. The people had rebelled; they had no longer even the letter 
of the law to protect them; they stood naked before the oppressor, yet, 
disarmed and disfranchised as the}' were, there was not power enough 
in the English government to drive them from the land; they clung to it 
with death-like grasp and it was found impossible to to do anything 
with them except to let them remain and trust to rack-rents, evictions, 
famines, and penal laws for their extermination. 

And now the landlord smote the people with a two edged sword. 
First, he held to the settlement of James I, in that he should not make 
improvements on the land, not being its owner. Second,he held to the 
Cromwellian settlement, in that the occupants had no rights in the land, 
and could be rack-rented aud evicted at the landlords' will, and thus 
as between the upper and the nether millstone were the Irish people 
ground to powder. 

Now, those who have been patient enough to follow me through 
this dry legal disquisition will comprehend what this phrase of Irish 
tenant right means as understood and claimed by Irish farmers. Ten- 
ant right as claimed by them does not mean a right to be tenants in 
the ordinary sense; it means a recognition of their ancient and present 
rights in the land ; a right to occupy the land not as tenants, but as 
owners, subject to no rent whatever as rent proper, but only to the pay- 



(13) 

m&nt of a proper annual sum in lieu of a tribute which it was always 
their duty to pay, ami subject also, they now claim, to their right to 
extinguish this tribute upon the payment of a proper sum in hand, the 
amount of the tribute to be determined now on the same principle that 
it was fust determined, making proper allowance for the difference in 
values between the present and the former times, and the amount re- 
quired lor extinction of tribute to be determined by ordinary commer- 
cial calculation as to what amount of present capital is equal to a cer- 
tain annual interest. 

Tenant right in Ireland means a recognition of rights enjoyed by 
the Irish farmers for more than a thousand years before the English 
came into Ireland, recognized by the English authorities for more than 
4(H) years alter their invasion, and recognized to this day by English 
landlords as to one-half of the compact, that of not making improve- 
ments on the land because they were not owners of it. To compel them 
to recognize it as to the other half, ownership by the occupant, is the 
object of the present National Land League of Ireland. For the ex- 
planation of the separation of the land of the chief from the land of the 
truant, in the grants to landlords on the change from Irish to English 
tenure, I am entirely indebted to the learned, recent and thorough re- 
search of Mr. Seebohm, as set forth in the 19th Century for January, 

1881. 

As to the lights of the.old chiefs and their descendants, that is 
another question, a question which the Land League does not profess 
to discuss. 

Ireland Under Irish Kulc. 

Such was the old Irish system as to occupation of land. How did 
Ireland prosper under that system? 

In the archives of Irish academies, in the alcoves of old monaster- 
ies, in libraries at Oxford, .London, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen 
as also in the great collection at the Vatican, ancient manuscripts are 
found giving accounts of battles fought in Ireland two thousand 
years ago with swords of finest temper, shields embossed with silver 
and helmets wrought in gold, and, day by day, delvers in Irish earth 
tindeven now proofs that the old accounts are true. 

The Roman legions carried their conquering eagles over every land 



I M 

then known, oft* to the mountains of Asia, down to the wilds of Africa, 
up to the forests of Germany, across the fair land of Prance, over the 
English Channel and into the heart of ancient Britain, where they lived 
and ruled for more than five hundred years, yet throughout all that 
time there was one fair land they never set hostile foot upon, the sacred 
soil of Erin's Isle. 

It cannot be supposed that the ancient Romans who had traversed 
all lands and crossed all seas could live side by side with Ireland for 
live hundred years without coveting its possession. That they never 
even tried to possess it shows that throughout that period the Irish 
people had cultivated the art of war as well as enjoyed the delights of 
peace. 

You know how far back it seems now when we speak of the days 
of Charlemagne, yet those w r ere the times the Irish were fighting the 
Danes, then masters of England and scourges of Europe, yet the re- 
sources of Ireland were, even then, so well developed under Irish rnl e 
that she was able to withstand their assaults for two hundred years, 
till in the eleventh century they were finally routed and conquered by 
an Irish host on the field of Clontarf. 

In the twelfth century, the woolen goods of Ireland, which had been 
celebrated before the christian era for excellence of texture and beauty 
of color, were still sought for in every part of Europe. 

At the opening of the sixteenth century, the native Irish had iron 
works in the centre and south and west of Ireland. , 

In the seventeenth century, glass works were started. 

In the eighteenth century, silk and cotton manufactories were es- 
tablished, and before the eighteenth century then had been published 
in Ireland over 20,000 volumes of books, and there are old Irish manu 
script works there yet, not only unpublished but untranslated sufficient 
to make 20,000 more. 

If Ireland had been left to herself and her old Irish laws, with the 
lead she had in cotton, wool and silk, with her coal and iron, her grassy 
hills and fertile plains, her magnificent harbors, her forests of oak for 
ships, her western tishermen for sailors, her hardy sons for workers, 
her brilliant writers, her wonderful orators, her sagacious statesmen 
her unrivalled soldiers, her noble prelates, with the purity of her faith- 



(15) 

ful women, and the heroism of her gallant men, she would now be a 
country of twenty millions of people, the superior of Portngal, Den- 
mark, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden, the peer of Belgium and Hol- 
land and the rival of England. Ah! there's the rub. The rival of 
England! It was the old struggle of Cartilage and Rome. Delenda est 
Carthago. Let Ireland be destroyed. There is the explanation of the 
mystery of 700 years. You may strike men down in battle, you may 
mock at their religion, you may despise their race, but so long as you 
do not touch their right to live where God has placed them, their right 
to profit by their labor, their right to manage their own affairs, they 
can forget your victories in war. tolerate your difference in religion and 
laugh at your boast of blood. But, deny them freedom, deny them 
food, deny them government, and they'll hate you till they die. 

In the natural order of things so far as geographical location, 
natural resources, and maritime facilities are concerned, these spots 
of land on the western coast of Europe should be the Irish and not the 
British Isles ; the governing power should be the Irish and not the 
British Parliament. The London of to-day should be, not at the back 
door of England, 50 miles up the sluggish Thames, but around the 
bright shores of Dublin Bay, or on the pleasant waters of the River 
Lee. Why is it not so ? Oh ! it is because nations are not made by 
geographical location, nor natural resources, nor maritime facilities 
but by the daring genius of bold determined men. England had men 
of genius to foresee, and of iron heart to execute. It was not the Sax- 
ons who injured Ireland. So long as none but Saxons ruled in Eng- 
land. Ireland had nothing to complain of. Did you ever hear of Irish- 
men complaining of Edward the Confessor or of Edmund or of Athel- 
stanl No! And this is why the ill will of Ireland is not directed against 
the great body of English people, who are Saxons.but against the heart- 
less rulers of that country, who are of quite a different race. The 
Anglo-Saxons lost control of England in 1006, and never regained it. 
The Normans, nnder William the Conqueror, captured England then, 
and England has been ruled by foreigners ever since. Did you ever 
hear one of the ruling class in England to-day admit that he was an 
Anglo-Saxon ? Don't they all claim to have come over with William 
the Conqueror \ 



(16) 

But neither was it from the Normans proper that the troubles of 
Ireland began. There was a tribe came after William the Conqueror 
worse than the Normans, the Angevins, and they were the devils incar- 
nate who began the present troubles of the Irish people. They were 
descended from one of those moral monsters with which God in his 
wrath sometimes afflicts the world, from the infamous Fulc the Black, 
wife murderer of Anjou. Henry II. was his representative in England. 
This was the man who began English rule in Ireland. According to 
the accounts of even English historians, he was a devil incarnate if 
there ever was such a. thing in this world, and his end as told by Eng- 
lish writers was so fearfully horrible, not from physical torture, for no 
man touched him, so fearfully horrible I say that I would not dare to 
shock you to night by a repetition of the blasphemies which preceded 
it. 

You have heard of a King of England who, enraged because he 
could not chastise the people of Wales as he wished, turned upon the 
hostages he held, the sons and daughters of the noblest families of 
Wales and rooted out the ej^es of the youths and amputated the ears 
and noses of the daughters. This was the king who did it. 

You have heard of St, Thomas a' Beckett, who was murdered in the 
house of God while participating in the vesper chant; stricken down 
within the chancel, his brains dug out with a sword and smeared 
upon the altar. This King Henry was the instigator of the murder. 

There were four sons of a King of England once. One of them, 
afterwards Richard I. of England, said: " The custom of our family 
is that the son shall hate the father; our destiny is to detest each 
other. This is our heritage which we shall never renounce. From the 
devil we came; to the devil we will return." These were the sons of this 
King Henry. 

There was a King of England once who said: '" Accursed be the 
day on which I was born, and accursed of God be the children I leave 
behind me." That was also tliis same King Henry. 

But there was another malediction he uttered before his death, 
more fearful than any of these. A malediction which I dare not repeat 
to you. I will not say go to the histories and find it. You can find it 
if you look for it, but you cannot read it without honor, nor after- 



(1?) 

wards think of it without terror. The rule of these Angevins devils 
lasted about 300 years. This Henry II. was the first of the brood; the 
cx.okcd hack tyrant, Richard III., was the last. 1 have said that Eng- 
land had men of genius to foresee, and iron hearts to execute. These 
were some of them, :md all English rulers of Ireland since, in everything 
relating to Ireland, seem to have inherited their cruelty of character, 
determining every Irish question not upon any principle of natural 
justice but solely upon the cold blooded policy of how most to injure 
Ireland and prevent her in any way rivalling England. Do my Ameri- 
can friends smile a little at this, thinking it a Celtic exaggeration? Ah! 
if they do, it only proves how necessary it is for us to show them what 
enormities have been perpetrated upon the Irish people, under the 
forms of English law. Did you ever hear of the Penal Laws, in force 
in Ireland down to a late day? King Henry was not more enraged by 
Welsh resistance than his successors were by Irish obstruction. 
King Henry was not more cruel to his Welsh hostages than his succes- 
sors were to their Irish subjects. They forbade to the Irish people all 
liberty of Religion; forbade them to speak the Irish language, to have 
Irish books, or to instruct Irish children. It was declared by these 
laws that the life of an Irishman, or thehonor of an Irishwoman might 
be taken at will, anywhere outside the pale, that is anywhere over 50 
miles from Dublin; and to mark their hatred of the Irish race, they 
enacted that if an Englishman dared to marry an Irishwoman, he was 
to be half hanged, his heart cut out before he was dead, his head 
struck off and his lands forfeited to the crown. Do you ask whether 
these laws had not been left simply a dead letter on the Statute book? 
Many of them were not only in force but enforced down to 1829. 

This Henry II. was the first English king who claimed to govern 
Ireland, and he did it on the pretence of wishing to improve the morals 
of the people. His first step in the business showed his diabolical 
qraft. He knew that the deepest, strongest love which the Irish people 
had, was for their old Catholic faith, and that they had unmeasured 
respect, love and affection for the holy Father, visible head of their 
Church. Now, how do you suppose he applied that knowledge. He 
forged a Bull, as coming from the Pope, giving to him the sovereignty 



(18) 

of Ireland, and calling upon the people of Ireland to render him alle- 
giance. 

Thus the very beginning of English rule in Ireland was built on a 
a foundation of fraud, and ever since, it has been continued by fraud, 
treachery, robbery, rapine, murder, slaughter and every other crime 
known in the calender. 

I have shown you that many kinds of manufactures were es- 
tablished in Ireland long ago. Do you want to know why they are 
not there now? I'll tell you why. 

I said a little while ago that if Ireland had been let alone she 
would now be the rival of England. That was not exactly the correct 
way to put. it, Ireland had been the instructor of England in arts and 
manufactures for a thousand years. England had tried to become the 
rival of Ireland in these things and had failed, down to within two 
years of the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the year 1698, 
the manufacturerers of England, through the medium of parliament, 
presented a petition to the king representing that the woolen factories 
of Ireland were developing to that extent that they were draining to 
Ireland English subjects with their families and servants, in such num- 
bers that it threatened to injure the trade of England, to diminish the 
value of land there and to seriously decrease the population of the 
island. 

Is not this very much like what I said a little while ago that if 
natural laws had been allowed to operate, the city of London as it is 
now developed as to wealth and extent, would be found, not in Eng- 
land, but in Ireland. 

Kings do not often answer petitions, but the king in this case was 
William III., who had been in Ireland, and knew the resources of 
the country and the energies of the people. He answered the peti- 
tion and the answer was the death knell of Irish industry and, neces- 
sarily, of Irish progress. His answer was: " I shall do all that in me 
lies to discourage the woolen trade of Ireland * * * and 
promote the trade of England." 

The same policy was pursued as to every other art and industry in 
Ireland. The consequence was they were all destroyed. As our gal- 
lant Meagher puts it: " The cotton manufactories of Dublin have been 



(19) 

destroyed; the staff and serge manufactories have been destroyed; the 
calico Looms of Balbriggan have been destroyed; the flannel manufac- 
tories of Rathdown have been destroyed; the blanket manufactories of 
Kilkenny have been destroyed; the camlet trade of Bandon which pro- 
duced £100,000 a year lias been destroyed, the worsted and stuff manu- 
factories of Waterford have been destroyed; the rateen and frieze man- 
ufactories of Carrick-on-Snir have been destroyed; one business alone 
thrives and flourishes, that favored and privileged and patronized busi- 
ness of the manufacture of Irish coffins. 

That is the reason, and the only reason why the Imperial Parliament 
sits to day in Loudon and not in Dublin, that is the reason and the 
only reason why the destinies of the British Isles are controled to day 
by Englishmen and not by Irishmen." 

Does any one say that this is absurd; that England had ruled and 
conquered Ireland centuries before the time of this woolen business, 
and that this regulation was a matter of commerce and choice of resi- 
dence only; that if the trade had been left in Ireland the only difference 
would have been that the English master would have resided there in- 
stead of in England? Not so. In 1698 England had not conquered 
Ireland; in less than a century after that time England was compelled 
to recognize the national independence of Ireland, and if Irish manufac- 
turers had not been stamped out of existence by Stafford in 1636, by 
William III. in 1698, and regularly by others after, the Act of Union 
of 1800 would not have been an Act of Union of Ireland to England, 
but of England to Ireland. 

Until the accursed act of Union was carried by the most atrocious 
frauds ever perpetrated, the King of England governed Ireland by vir- 
tue of his Irish crown, separate entirely from his English authority. 
Until the time of Henry VIII, no English King claimed to be King of 
Ireland, but simply lord, thereof. The Union as passed in 1800 recog- 
nized the title as King of Great Britain and Ireland : as it might have 
been passed, if the industries of Ireland had not been strangled, the 
title would have been King of Ireland and Great Britain. 

Will any one say that we had not the men to have done this, even 
if we had the chance ? Englishmen did it in England, why not Irishmen 
in Ireland? Are Englishmen superior to Irishmen in these things? 



(20) 

When have they shown it when the two races had an equal chance? 
Have they shown it in this country? It is hardly fair to speak of col- 
onial times, for Englishmen here were then in their own country and 
came to it with rank and fortune, title and honor and power and pos- 
session of land assured to them by letters patent from the crown. Of 
course, when the revolution came, they still held their station, changing 
only their allegiance, and yet, with all of this great start assured them, 
we shall find a little further on that when the struggle came, the Irish 
people who entered at the lowest level of the social scale, naked and 
helpless, fleeing from persecution, with nothing but clear heads, strong 
hands and stout hearts to depend upon, had already worked their way 
pretty well to the top. But take the arrivals from the two countries 
since American independence. Hav'nt the Irish held their own pretty 
well, compared with the English new comers ? Did the English pro- 
duce any one here equal to Andrew Jackson ? When GeneralJackson 
Avas holding his receptions at New Orleans did they send any one over 
from England who was able to match him ? 

Go to Europe! Tell me in what continental nation these Englishmen 
have surpassed us in rising to high position. Did they do it in Russia, 
to which we gave two field marshals and a governor general? Did 
they do it in Austria, to which we gave two marshals, three aulic coun- 
cillors and have there to-day the Count O'llara Taafle a cabinet min- 
ister? Did they do it in Spain to which we gave several captains 
genera], ambassadors and grandees, and, even over all their proud 
hidalgos, placed one of our race as prime minister? Did they do it in 
France, to which Ave gave governors, ambassadors, cabinet ministers 
and half a dozen marshals, besides the great marshal president? Is 
there any continental nation Avhere they rose to eminence? Oh yes! 
There is one. Turkey. They are great among the Turks, 

Will it be argued that our brilliant achievements in this respect 
were because our best men went abroad, while theirs stayed at home ? 
Well ! Even this brilliant galaxy of foreign successes did not exhaust 
our supply at home. We had a few men left even after this immense 
draught on our resources. Some of these men, unable to rise at home,, 
crossed over to English soil, challenging Englishmen on their oavu 
ground, and in spite of prejudice, patronage and power, rose in every 



(21) 

department of literature, science, art, politics and statesmanship to the 
highest place to which a subject might aspire. The most brilliant 
writers in England are Irishmen. The finest comedy that ever de- 
lighted a London audience was written by Sheridan, an Irishman- 
The greatest interpreter of Shakespeare that ever trod the English 
boards was Edmund BLean, an Irishman. The man who came next to 
him in this power was his son Charles, an Irishman, The leader of 
English science to day is John Tyndal, an Irishman, The very walls 
of the Parliament, from which Irishmen to-day are excluded, are de- 
corated with the magic pencil of McClise, an Irishman, Theprbfound- 
ed statesman who ever Lifted his voice within those walls was Edmund 
Burke, an Irishman. The Lord Mayor of (lie City of London to-day 
is an Irishman. The Ambassador of England at St. Petersburg is an 
Irishman ; the ablest Indian Viceroy England ever bad was Mayo, an 
Irishman, and the acknowledged greatest General England has to-day 
is Roberts, an Irishman. 

There was a sound of revelry by night, 

And Belgium's capital had gathered then 

Her beauty and her chivalry; and bright 

The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men. 

But tire bravest, grandest man who that night graced the hall was 
he who combined in himself the character of General of the British 
army and Commander-in-Chief of the allied forces of Europe in the 
gigantic struggle against the great Napoleon. All the night long he 
bowed with courtly grace, and trod the mazes of the dance, as gaily as 
thoughhe werebutthe carpet knight he seemed, yet he alone ofall assem- 
bled in that hall knew that Napoleon was silently massing his forces 
for the havoc of the morrow. All had been prepared for his arrival, 
but the people must not know of it. No alarm must be given. One 
look of care upon that face, one word of the fate that was impending, 
and the city would have gone wild with terror. And so, all the night 
long he danced and bowed and smiled, waiting, waiting for the terrible 
signal gun. At last, at last it came. Bounding upon his steed he 
dashed to the field, and the victory of Waterloo added another crown 
to England's glory. 

This man. too, was an Irishman, one whose fathers and grand- 



(22) 

fathers for centuries bad been born.in Ireland, and had lived and died 
upon Irish soil. 

With all this splendid record made by the Irish race, and I have 
not told you the half of it, wouid you not think there was enough 
natural generosity among the English rulers to treat Ireland with 
some approach to ordinary .justice. Has it done so ? Let us see. 

I have attempted to show you something of what Ireland was under 
Irish rule, and something of what it was capable of being, under any 
thing like a proper rule by anybody. 

Let me now try to show you something of the condition to which 
it has been brought by the persecuting policy of this ungrateful British 
Government. 

Ireland Under English Rule. 

In seeking to describe the condition of an oppressed country we 
naturally go to the people themselves for an account of then- grievances, 
but in trying to picture to you the condition of Ireland I dare not do 
this. The story they tell is one of such horror, such misery, such des- 
pair, that were I to cite their reports, your reason would revolt and re- 
fuse to accept them as true. Americans would say that under the rule 
of enlightened English statesmen of the 19th century such a state of 
things is impossible, at least as to Ireland '. that in some remote and 
recently acquired colony in Africa or Asia some approach to such a 
condition of things might possibly, for a little while exist, until the 
beneficent laws of England could be put in operation, but that in Ire- 
land, a sister isle, within arm's length of England, claimed to have 
been ruled by it for seven hundred years, and full in the gaze of 
European civilization, such things are impossible. I will therefore 
cite not one single Irish authority on the subject. I will cite for you 
none but the declarations of English continental and American states- 
men, travellers and writers. This may seem like rashly ceding too 
much of the strength of Ireland's claim. Alas ! Its grievances are so 
great that were even the major part of them withheld, enough would 
still remain to command the sympathy of the world. Some of the de- 
clarations as to these grievances have been collected by Mr. Farrer, in 
the Contemporary Review for January, 1881. He gives the date of the 



(23) 

declarations, but says, thai owing to England's refusal to grant re- 
forms they are as true now as the day they were written. 

Gustave de Beaumont, the celebrated French publicist, was 
astounded in reading ;i repori of an English Parliamentary Commis- 
sion, that there were in Ireland nearly three millions of people exposed 
every year to the peril of absolute want. He could not believe it, and 
in 1835 visited thecountry, in person, to satisfy himself on the matter. 
Having seen it, lie wrote : — " I have seen the Indian in his forests, and 
the negro in his chains, and I thought 1 had beheld the lowest 
term of human misery, but I did not then know the lot of Ireland. * 
Irish misery forms a type by itself of which there exists nowhere 
else either model or imitation. In seeing it, one recognizes that no 
theoretical limits can be assigned to the misfortunes of nations," Mr. 
Fairer adds of De Beaumont that. " he does not hesitate to pronounce 
the condition of the population worse than that of the mediaeval serfs. 
He finds it difficult to say whether the dwellings inhabited or the 
dwellings deserted form the saddest sight. The condition," he says, 
"which in Ireland is above poverty, would be, among other people, 
frightful distress, and the miserable people who in France are justly 
pitied, would form in Ireland a privileged class." 

Von Raumer, Professor of History at Berlin, "visited Ireland in 
1835 and returned with his mind filled with one thought, the indescrib- 
able misery of so many thousands of people. The day he spent there 
he counted as the saddest of his life. In England he had looked, in vain 
for misery, and found the reports of it exaggerated, but, of Ireland, no 
words could express the frightful truth that everywhere met the eye. 
There, the sun mast testify that Europe, too has its pariahs — yet, not 
Europe, but Ireland alone." 

A few days later Kohl, the distinguished German traveller wrote 
still more strongly of what is still to this day the condition of a large 
part of Ireland. " He had pitied the Letts of Livonia, for living in huts 
built of unhewn logs of trees, with the crevices stopped with moss but 
having seen the west of Ireland, he regarded the Letts, Esthnonians and 
and Finlanders as living in a state of comparative comfort. He doubted 
whether in the whole world a nation could be found subjected to the 
physical privations of the peasantry in some parts of Ireland. * * 



[24) 

Nowhere but in Ireiand could be found human creatures, living, from 
year's end to year's end, on the same root, berry or weed. There were 
animals, indeed, that did so, but human beings — no where save in Ire- 
land." 

Mr. Farrer says: — "English travellers have not spoken less 
graphically than foreigners of the real state of parts of Ireland, from the 
time of Spencer, the poet, down to the recent account of Mr. Tuke in 
1880." 

"It is undeniable," said Inglis, after his visit to Ireland in 1834, 
" that the condition of the Irish poor is immeasurably w r orse than that 
of the West Indian slave." 

Barrow, after a tour in Ireland in 1835, writes: — "No picture drawn 
by the pencil, none by the pen, can possibly convey an idea of the 
sad reality, * * There is no other country on the face of the 
earth where such extreme misery prevails as in Ireland." 

Count Cavour, published two articles on Ireland in 1843 and '44, 
in which he spoke, "of the deplorable condition of the agricultural 
population." 

Jules de Lasterye, in the Reoue ties Deux Mondes in 1853 says: — 
" The question is always the same, before and after the poor law 7 , before 
and after the famine, before and after the emigration, before and after 
the institution of the Encumbered Estates Court." 

The AbbePerrand, afterwards Bishop of Autun, visited the Island 
in 1860, and wrote: — " How great was my astonishment, more than 20 
years after the second journey of De Beaumont to come upon the very 
destitution so eloquently described by him in 1839!" Mr. Fairer says 
of him: — "After living long in a department considered as one of the 
poorest and most backward in France, Perrand undertook to say. * 
* " that the lot of the poorest peasant in France could not compare 
with the misery of a large part of Ireland." 

What do American travellers say? Last year the Inter-Ocean of 
Chicago commissioned Mr. Redpath to visit Ireland and report upon its 
condition. I heard his report at a public meeting in Chicago. As I 
remember it, he said:— " Christianity . has been called the religion of 
sorrow. If it be so, then the Holy Land of our day is in the West of Ire- 
land. In spirit let us loose the sandals from our feet as w r e draw near 



(25) 

that sacred ground. Every sod of its ancient soil is wet with the dew 
of human tears. Every murmur of its dripping brooks is accompanied 
with a chorus of sighs from breaking human hearts. Every breeze 
which sweeps across its barren moors, carries to the mountain tops, 
and, 1 trust, far beyond, the groans and the prayers of a brave but des- 
pairing people. The sun never sets upon their sorrows except to give 
place to the pitying stars which look down there on human woes, 
countless as their own constellated hosts. I cannot paint those woes. 
I cannot portray those sorrows. As often as I try I fail. When I 
think of tlie woes I have witnessed and the laws which produced them, 
my blood boils with indignation. When 1 think of the sorrows I have 
seen, and how many must yet be borne, my heart dissolves in tears." 

Mind you! Not one of these words I have quoted comes from the 
mouth of an Irishman. England may silence Irish members of Parlia- 
ment, but there is an indictment drawn against her by the greatest men 
of Continental Europe, endorsed by English writers and corroborated 
by American travellers, charging her with crimes against humanity un- 
equalled in the civilized or barbarous world; and the verdict of the 
world is guilty , guilty , guilty of the crime as chaiged. What can 
England plead in extenuation. Though she found the land a desert 
and the people savages, with seven hundred years of rule she should 
have reclaimed the land and civilized the people , But she found Ire- 
land no desert. She found it one of the fairest and richest 
lands the world had seen, adorned with castles and mansions 
and palaces of royal sj lendor, ancient towers and mediaeval seats of 
learning, possessed by a gay and happy and cultured people, a 
country known throughout Europe, as the Isle of Saints and the home 
of learned men. She has left it, still a land of beauty, for, to destroy 
that, was beyond her power, but the people, the poor unfortunate peo- 
ple, she has reduced to a bondage which cries to God for vengeance. 

Local ion of Distress. 

This horrible misery in Ireland, depicted by the different author- 
ities I have cited, does not apply to all classes there in equal degree, 
nor does it exist in equal extent in all places. 

There are a great many farmers there who are tolerably well to 
do. but they are few in comparison with the mass, and they are people 



(•26) 

who, by reason of their former position, natural abilities, cultivated 
faculties, economical habits, business capacity, and great force and 
energy of character, instead of being merely well to do, ought to be 
the solid men of their respective counties. These people, with a keen 
sense of what is due to themselves and their families, not only in the 
way of material comforts and ordinary luxuries of life, but also in the 
matter of social position for themselves and their sons and daughters 
are just as much victims of oppression as their, in some respects, less 
fortunate fellow sufferers. Then as to the geographical distrbution of 
this suffering. In the northern part of the country it exists in what we 
might call the positive degree; in the east and part of the south it 
rises to the comparative state, it is only in the west and south west 
that it mounts to the superlative degree of human misery, that is, the 
superlative degree, as compared with the others. To farmers in the 
United States, the most favored condition of tenant farmers in Ireland 
at the present day, would be considered simply unendurable, not in 
the matter of food and clothing, of which, thank God, the class I am 
speaking of has enough, but because of the lack of those things which, 
after mere food an 1 clothing, make all of life that, in the common sense,. 
is worth having. There are about 500,000 tenant farmers in Ireland, 
representing a population of about three millions of people. There 
are about two and a half million other people who are dependent on 
these farmers for employment. It will not, in this country, be con- 
sidered a rash proposition to sa} T , that any man who denies himself 
the pleasures of city life, and gets down to the hard, close, continual 
struggle of digging his sustenance out of the soil, ought, at least, have 
the satisfaction of owning the land on which his labor is expended and 
on which his life is passed. There ought, therefore, be at least five 
hundred thousand persons in Ireland owners of land. Do you know 
how many there are ? Until very recently, only eight thousand, and 
the major part of the land owned by about seven hundred persons. 
Only seven hundred persons owning one-half the soil of a nation 
which, forty years ago, had a population of nearly nine millions of 
people, and which, by natural increase alone, ought to be now, at 
least, twenty millions. It is now only a little over five, yet the rich grow 
richer every day. 



(•27) 

Cause of the Suffering. 

What is the cause of all this trouble? Can it be ascertained? Has 
mortal man ever fathomed the mystery? 

Every traveller who has visited the island, dining the present cen- 
tury. from whatever courtly he may have come, whatever may have been 
his station at home, whatever may have been his hobbies there, every 
one of them, when called upon to joint out the immediate cause of Ire- 
land's woe, marches straight to one particular book, opens it at the 
same identical page, and puts his linger on the same identical spot. 
We approach and look. — It is the Land Law of Ireland. There's 
where all the trouble comes from. That's what kills your men, 
women and children! that's what unroofs your houses, tears 
down their walls and makes their hearth stones desolate. 
That's what depopulates your provinces and sends your poor 
people flying to the ends of the earth, seeking, and thank God! 
finding shelter. They quickly set to work to gain for themseles afoot- 
hold, they grasp here and there such advantages as come within their 
reach, but, half the time they are glancing back at their persecutors and 
racking their brains for some means of revenge. Gradually as they 
grow stronger, they come together and the one sole inquiry is how, 
how, how may it be done! 

" Haste me to know it, 

That I, with wings as swift 

As meditation, or the thoughts of love, 

May sweep to my revenge. 

Of course, they cry 

Revolution. 

Of course, they say, "Let us gather our hosts from the ends of the 
earl h, let us fall on them and crush them !" Tell us to discourage revolution 
to such men! Why they'll rend us limb from limb if we do it. And yet, 
we have to do it. We must do it for the sake of the loved ones at home, 
For us to talk revolution now, is, with our own hands, to put the knife 
to the throats of our own brothers and sisters, our own kith and kin; 
it is to become our own executioners. 

In the polar regions of the north, when the bitterest cold of winter 
rules, a cold which destroys even the sense of feeling, the people there 



(-28) 

set their daggers in the ice and smear the blades with blood, The 
famished beasts of prey approach and, wild with hunger, insensible 
with cold, they lick those blades, which give an outward show of relief. 
As they lick the blades there?',? a flow of blood but the poor creatures 
are unable to feel that it is their own. Day by day, the crafty hunters, 
with no further effort than to reach forth their hands, gather in the 
spoil. 

The successors of Angevin rule in Ireland are endowed with all of 
the Angevin craft, and they have no more regard for the Irish people 
than the Esquimaux have tor the wild beasts which surround them. 

The tyrants place within your reach the daggers of revolution- 
The Holy Father says: do not touch them. Not now! To touch them 
now is death. Do not doubt the Holy Father. Do not doubt his love 
for the Irish people. Do not doubt his devotion to the Irish cause. Do 
not doubt his adherence to the principle of a nation's right to be inde- 
pendent. Do not fear his ban upon revolution for jnst cause. The 
Holy Father is to day the most pronounced revolutionist in Europe. 
He defies the usurpation of the House of Savoy. He declares that the 
independence of the Papal States must and shall be restored. Do not 
think that he recoils from use of force when force is proper. When 
the Buzzuri came down from the Alps to destroy the Temporal Power, 
he flung to the front the noblest youth of Rome: told them to go and 
die, if need be, for. their country. They went, and the soil of Roman 
territory was reddened with their blood, which the Holy Father did not 
scruple to shed in behalf of Roman independence. 

Show him that you are in earnest, that yon have just cause, com- 
bined with the strength, the will and the opportunity required, and 
you'll have no complaint to make of the action of the Holy Father. 

Well! Is there no present remedy? Oh yes! Our American 
friends propose one. 

Emigration. 

Let the people emigrate they say. Let the surplus population 
come to America. They will find here plenty of land, and work and 
food and freedom for all. Then the competition for land at home will 
be reduced and those who want farms can get them at their own price. 
Irishmen answer, hav'nt we come, millions and millions of us r and 



(29) 

though we have profited by the change, has it benefited those at home? 
Not al all. As DeLasterye told you, the question is always the same. 
Jusi as fast as ihc landlord finds that oneofhis tenants has, in one way 

or aiict her, got hall' his family over to America, he says:— "Now this 
man has only hall' as many mouths to feed, only half as many backs 
to clothe as before. He can therefore pay me twice as much rent. 
Steward! Double that man's rent for next pay day," and up it goes and 
the farmer is no better off than before. You think this is overdrawn? 
What do you say to this? The rent has been raised because the farmer 
h;,s been seen on a market day, with a new coat; because his daughter 
has been seen at church with a string of glass beads about her neck, 
aye, incredible or you may think, because the agent has seen a pot of 
flowers in the farmer's window:—" If you can spend money for flowers 
you can pay more rent— pay it or leave/' Statistics show that the 
degree of (listless is just about the same, whether the population is one 
million, :is it was in the seventeenth century, or eight millions as it was 
in the nineteenth, and it is so because the landlord instead of fixingthe 
rent according to the value of the land, forces it up to the highest point 
compatible with the tenants power— not to feed, clothe and educate his 
family, but to save them from absolute starvation, and though he 
strain a point too far and the tenant die, what does the landlord care! 
lie can get another tenant in his place or, if not, he can do with the land 
what pleases him better— fatten beef upon it. Do yon ask why the 
tenant takes ;i hum at too high a rent? Why will a starving man pro- 
mise, what you like, for food? He cannot go elsewhere. There is no 
other employment for him. lie must take the land or starve. 

In the ancient Province of Meath there are miles, and miles of 
land, mile.- in length and miles in breadth, once covered with the homes 
of tenant farmers, now, the tenants evicted, the houses demolished, 
the hedges uprooted, the land levelled, turned into grass and given 
over to cattle. The famine of the tenant is the harvest of the landlord. 
'Hi., discovery of steam and perfection of machinery changed the econ- 
omic laws of the world. England was rich in coal and iron. With 
coal and iron came steam and machinery. With steam and machinery 
,ame commerce, and with all these England became the workshop of 
the world. With steam and machinery she did, in that little island, 



(30) 

work equal to the manual labor of six hundred millions of men, and 
in all the world there are not three hundred million manual laborers. 
By the most stringent prohibitory laws she forbade Ireland from com- 
peting with her in that work. English ships went, therefore, to all 
parts of the world laden with English manufactures. Wheat and corn 
to feed the workers they could bring back from the most distant lands. 
Fresh meat they could not ; therefore Irish lands became more valu- 
able for grazing than for farming ; therefore landlords improved every 
opportunity of evicting fanners and establishing graziers ; therefore 
emigration means enlarged rule for the landlord class, and propor- 
tionate ruin to the Irish people. 

In the spring of 1879 the leaders of the Irish people saw that 
another 

Famine 
was coming. The experience of '47 taught them that famine meant 
failure to pay rent, that failure to pay rent meant eviction, and that 
eviction meant death. Those who know the tenacity with which the 
poor people of Ireland cling to their little pieces of land know that the 
only cause they give for eviction is the non-payment of rent, and that 
they fail to pay rent only from absolute inability to do so, after deny- 
ing themselves, not only all luxuries, but all articles of convenience 
and comfort, all clothing down to rags hardly covering their naked- 
ness ; all food down to barely what is necessary to keep soul and body 
together. Of course, after a man has stripped himself and family to 
that extent, eviction means death, for, the fell spirit of hate so pos- 
sessed the exterminating landlord class, that though the friends and 
neighbors of the evicted person, generally in scarcely better condition 
than he, would, of charity, wish to divide even the last crust with the 
outcast, they imperilled their own lives in so doing, for, every such 
act was marked, and the party so granting aid was literally u booked" 
for the next eviction possible in his own case. This is incredible, but 
it is true. It would seem that human cruelty could no further go, but 
in the Gerard evictions at Ballinglas, in the County of Gralway, though 1 
no rent was due, it was determined to destroy the village. With 
sheriflf, police and dragoons, the villagers were ousted, the houses torn 
down, and even the very foundations dug out of the ground, and the 



(31) 

people told to go anywhere, anywhere out of the landlord's sight. One 
woman, with a child at the breast, was hunted out of three places of 
refuge, and when the poor creatures huddled in the ditches, and built 
little fires there to temper the chill night blast, the heartless agents 
of still more heartless landlords followed them there, and stamped 
out even that poor source of warmth. Do you say this is horrible ? It 
is nothing, absolutely nothing, to what has been done in Ireland dur- 
ing your lives and mine, not once, but thousands and thousands of 
times. After these outrages came others, called agrarian, occasional 
wild, desperate revenges, the cause of which was stated in the Eng- 
lish Parliament in '46, by Lord John Russell, and repeated by Glad- 
stone in 'TO. " It is," they said, " no other than the cause which the 
great master of human nature describes, when he makes the tempter 
suggest it as a reason to violate the law," 

" Famine is in thy cheeks, 

Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, 

Upon thy back hangs ragged misery 

The world is not thy friend, n}r the world's law 

The world affords no law to make thee rich, 

Then be not poor, but break it." 

In the famine of '46, '49 there were three hundred thousand evic- 
tions in Ireland, meaning death or exile to more than a million people. 
For less than this in '89 France was drenched with blood and the op- 
pressors there swept from the face of the earth. 

That a frantic rising of the people in Ireland did not follow the 
famine of '79 is due to the inception, perfection and remarkable man- 
agement of one of the most wonderful organizations of modern times, 

The Land League 
of Ireland. The British government should have been grateful for this 
should it not? it ought to have rejoiced that any orginazation took 
upon itself the great task of assuaging the sorrows and vindicating 
the rights of live millions of its people, espousing their cause against 
the rapacity of a few thousand soulless wretches whose life business it 
was to grind the faces of the poor. The great English government, of 
course, applauded so great an act. Oh! not at all. Possessed with its 
implacable hatred of the Irish race, blinded by that hate to the plainest 
principles of justice, it descended from its imperial station to take up 



(32) 

the flghl of a S6l of vultures whose heartless policy even a band of first 
class brigands would scorn to adopt; snatched from civil life one of the 
leaders in the movement, and with usual British cruelty and stupidity 
flung him into a felon's cell, accomplishing thereby only this, that it 
added one more martyr to the Irish cause, exalted one more patriot 
to the hero's place, giving Irishmen one more memory to cherish, one 
more name to love, that of the gentle, generous and henceforth immor- 
tal Michael Davit r. 

There is another name now in the mouth of every friend of Ireland; 
a name historic for more than one generation in English and Irish 
annals, the name of the man whom of all men the English government 
now most hates and fears; one upon whose back the sleuth hounds of 
British vengeance have been already loosed, a man who bears to day a 
load of care greater than racks the brain i^ any crowned head in 
Europe, for, tin 1 destinies of a suffering race are in his hands, a man who 
for his greater strength, needs now above all things the assurance that 
he has the confidence, approval and support of that race for which he 
is risking his fortune, life, and honor, our present, prudent, trusted 
leader, Charles Stuart 

Parnell. 

All does not go smoothly under his rule. lie is charged with all 
sorts of contradictory faults. He is too timid, too bold; too va cilia ting- 
too dictatorial; too radical, too conservative: too visionary, too 
practical. Have you ever heard any one doubt his fidelity, to the cause 
of Ireland? Never! How does it happen then that some ot these very 
worthy gentlemen* and I do not mean to speak ironically, who criticize 
him se si verely are not holding the position of leader instead of this so 
incompetent person? I'll tell you why. It is because the work was there 
to be done, and whether he does it perfectly or not. he was by commons 
consent considered the best man to undertake it. and is still so consid 
• red. Reflect for a moment upon the situation of Parnell — single 
handed he is fighting the consolidated power of the British Empire. 
Single handed he is contending with the combined skill of the British 
Parliament, and they have had to change their form of government in 
order to beat him. How do you know what reasons he may have had. 
for the movements which gave dissatisfaction? How do you know how 



(33 1 

far they were feints, how far they were real? Are we foolish enough to 
sa3 thai his policy of yesterday must behispolicy of to-day, and the 
plan of to day the rule for to-morrow? His principle must he the 
same, yes, bul his policy must be as developments require. The mas- 
ter of a vesseJ aims all the time to reach a certain port. He takes an 
observation and adopts his course, but, day by day he finds that, 
though he lias headed right all the time, unseen currents have had 
power over him. and so, day by day, he takes his bearings and veers 
and tacks and shifts as need requires. Let us not be too exacting. 
Let us remember thai the sailors murmured at Columbus, and that 
Washington narrowly escaped being crushed by the cabal. Parnell 
himself summarized the situation in his last manifesto. If the people 
stand to the cardinal principle of the league, the withholding of rent, 
all is well. If they fail in this all is, for the present, lost. 

11 is a great dial for the people. There is a heavy pressure brought 
to bear upon them. Unless they get great encouragement they cannot 
hold out. And here comes the significance of Irish demonstrations here 
It is the cry going up from Irishmen in America to Irishmen in Ireland 
to 'Hold the Fort.' It is for this that your branch leagues are formed, 
for this, and to send supplies, that (he fort may beheld. Theresponse 
of Irishmen in America is a noble one. All over the land, branch 
leagues are formed and forming. The demonstration is probably all 
that could have been reasonably expected, but alas.it falls far short of 
what is required. 11 this movement fails, then, when the books are 
opened and the accounts ( xamiiK d, you will find that much of the cause 
of defeat will be charged to the insufficient aid received from the United 
States. The trouble is, that quicker work is required than people here 
can comprehend. By the time we get fully aroused and read}' to act 
in this matter the present fight, unless we move more quickly than we 
aredoing, will be over, with what result no one now can say. There is 
time enough yel to save the movement, if we will only hurry forward 
the supplies, 'fhe real draft upon the league fund at home has not yet 
begun. It will begin under the coercion act, to feed the families of our 
friends who will be testing the power of endurance of the British peo- 
ple. When the imprisonments and evictions begin, if there are not 
funds to feed the families of the victims, then the movement will fail 



,34 ) 

not through Parnell's fault, hut ours. It is possible there may be a 
compensation in this, but it is one that it would be reckless and in- 
human to count upon. Our present duty is to support 

The League. 
Let us examine for a moment the work of the league. One great 
trouble in doing anything in Ireland for the amelioration of the condi- 
tion of the Irish people has been that there were always so many fear- 
ful grievances to redress, it was difficult to tell when to begin. Every 
grievance on one side argued a privilege on the other. Every attempt 
to redress a grievance was a blow at privilege. Those bt nefitted by the 
particular privilege, of course, massed themselve> against the proposed 
reform, and they easily rallied all parties interested in other privileges 
to join them, by the powerful argument— "if you don't save us now, it 
will be your turn next." Within the memory of men now living, four- 
fifths or the people of Ireland were deprived of civil rights; they were 
not allowed to educate their children ; to hold office; to vote; to belong 
to the learned professions: to buy land; or even to own a horse worth 
£5 of British money. The great effort of O'Connell's life was to eman- 
cipate the mass of the people from this condition of servitude. At last, 
in 1829 the first victory was gained, and civil rights conceded. Then 
the most odious grievance remaining was, that the whole people were 
taxed to support an established church, to winch not one tenth of them 
belonged. For forty years that light went on. At last, that too was 
won. Then, two paramount grievances remained, the education question 
and the land question. As to both of these the light was carried on, 
with occasional small successes from time to time, but leaving the main 
issue still pending in each case, and the people somewhat divided in 
sentiment, as to which fight should be most determinedly pressed. Then 
came the famine of 1879, and it may be said that that is what de- 
termined the question as to where the Irish forces should be massed. 
When the Irish leaders saw in the spring of '79, that the crops were 
failing, they knew famine was coming again; they knew that this 
meant untold suffering to the people; a general eviction of the tenantry, 
and then, as evicted, starving men are prone to rebel, they foresaw 
'risings,' agrarian outrages and danger of losing all that had been 
gained. 



1 85 i 

Then Parnell and bis friends raised the cry of impending famine 
and need of relief. The landlords, the correspondents of the British 
press, and I he British officials, who prayed fbrfaminebecause it reduced 
the number of Irishmen, denied thai any such state of things existed. 
Then Parnell said, we will checkmate all these liars; we will go over to 
America and expose the situation to the world and beg food there to 
feed English subjects. Then the British government got alarmed at 
the effect of such demonstration, and, as a flank movement to Parnell, 
began to stir in the matter and give some aid, for which they now 
claim so much credit. A thorough organization of friends of Ireland 
having been effected to protect Ireland from hunger, as soon as that 
danger was over it was determined to keep up the organization, and 
with it make one more struggle for the great principle of tenant right 
in Ireland. 

It needed uo discission or argument) to convince Irish people 
that to obtain relief from England s ime radical means were required. 
In the long history of English rule in Ireland, it had never been known 
that England yielded a single measure of justice, except upon compul- 
sion. The Irish people had appealed to the reason of England, only to 
find prejudice stronger than reason. They had invoked the sympathy 
of the English rulers only to be told that sympathy had nothing to do 
with political economy. They had resorted to arms and were over- 
powered in the struggle. They now resolved to appeal in another 
quarter. They determined to appeal to the Irish people themselves 
and in a way that had never been tried before.. You know what a 
' strike' is. You know how a few thousand men refusing to go on under 
the old contracts will disarrange the business of a whole community. 
Some one, asked the question, '* why not get up a 'strike' all through 
Ireland, against paying these infamous rents? Put half a million ten- 
ant farmers on a Strike' against the land law of Ireland, and see what 
that will do. It was done. For the last year there has practically been 
no law in Ireland, except the rule of the land league. What has been 
tie- result? Many impatient spirits cry, '"Nothing, only to make things 
worse than before." Ah! that is a mistake. It is not true to say that 
nothing has been gaimd. It has taught the fiery Celts that great things 
can be done by calm, quiet, persistent effort and I don't know of any 



(36 ) 

greater blessing that could be brought to the Irish people than to ( ^t 
them to realize the truth of that proposition unless it be to prevail upon 
them to reduce it to practice. It has already forced an amendment to 
the British constitution, the curtailment of free speech. I do not say 
that that amendment is an improvement, but I have never understood 
that the improvement of the British constitution was any part of the 
mission of the Irish race. It has drawn the attention of thoughtful 
minds all over the world to the grievances of the Irish people in a way 
and to an extent that has never been done before. It has stripped from 
the face of England the hypocritical mask of an assumed philanthropy 
with which it has so long beguiled the world; it has shown to the 
nations of the earth in a way they never realized before, that England, 
with all its pretence of refinement, is a moral monster in its dealings 
with millions of people subject to its rule. In every quarter of the 
globe as well, as this, it has brought Irishmen together to swear again 
fidelity to the cause of their native land, and, neither last nor least, it 
has done what has never been done before, it has rooted out nearly all 
dissension between Irishmen in Ireland. It has done what was never 
done in Ireland, even in the days of Clontarf, for, under the potent sway 
of this great league, we see the North and the South, the East and the 
West, the high and the low, the old and the new, the Gall and the Gaill, 
all joining hands for sweet Ireland's sake. God grant that union may 
be perpetual! The greatest grievance Ireland ever had was internal 
discord. Remove that, and all the others will vanish like mists before 
the morning sun. 

The great power of union on the true principle and action in the 
right direction was never more quickly shown than now. Under merely 
moral suasion England laughed for years at the Irish demand for rule 
at home. A few months work of the land league and lo ! apian of 
Home Rule, by county government is proffered to> the Irish people in 
a speech from the throne itself. A few years ago this would have 
been hailed as a priceless boon; now, Irishmen hardly care to discuss 
the proposition - For decade after decade, divided Ireland asked for 
a new land law in Ireland. The British Parliament was too much oc- 
cupied w T ith other matters to give anything but the mocking act of 
1870, which left many things worse than before. A little more land 



.37) 

league, and the Government postpones its foreign business, and 
seriously considers the question. Is not all this something? Does 
it not show thai there is a power at work that has never been felt be- 
fore ( Ah! but there's the coercion bill! Well! what of it ? Is that 
anything new in Ireland? We have had 58 coercion bills since the 
act of union in 1S00, and Ireland still lives. Is English supremacy 
any better established now than before? The coercion bill is only 
another stupid English blunder. The wind and the sun strove one 
day. the fable says, with a traveller and his cloak, The wind blew 
his fiercest blasts, but the traveller only bugged his cloak more tightly 
about him. The sun shone forth with genial, kindly warmth, and lo! 
the traveller threw his cloak away. Had England been wise enough 
to let the sun of justice shine on Ireland there had been no need of 
coercion bills. 

What I lie League Demands. 

The league, after full deliberation, has formulated the demands of 
the Irish people. 

It divides its demand into three propositions, commonly called 
" the three F's," that is, Fixed tenure, Fair rent and Free sale," At 
present there is no fixity of tenure, no fairness of rent, no freedom of 
xi le. At present a landlord may evict a tenant almost at pleasure; there 
is, therefore, no fixity of tenure, no fixed time that a tenant can de- 
pend on lor holding his farm, and therefore he dare not build a house, 
nor improve his land, or in any way adorn or beautify his home. Life 
is for him a continued uncertainty, a prolonged agony of suspense. 
As John Stuart Mill said of him, he was the only human being who 
h; duo thing to gain from increased industry, and nothing to lose by 
increased idleness. 

There is no fairness of rent. The landlord charges, not what the 
land is worth, but what he pleases. 

There is no freedom of sale. The tenant is not allowed to sell his 
lease because he has none to sell. He is not allowed to sell his im- 
provements, and with the proceeds goto some other place, or into 
some other business, because if he leaves the land, all his improve- 
ments are forfeit to the landlord. Compensation is named in the act 
of 1870. It has that existence, but practically no other. It can be 



(,88) 

avoided always by raising the rent beyond the power of the tenant to' 
pay. Therefore the league demands that the government give fixity 
of tenure, fairness of rent and freedom of sale. It is demanded that 
the law be changed allowing the landlord to fix the tenure, and that 
there be substituted for it a rule that a tenant may hold his land as 
long as he pleases, provided he pa} T s the rent, and that in a famine 
season, certain delays may be had. 

It is demanded that the law be changed allowing the landlord to 
fix the rent, and that there be substituted for it a mode of fixing the 
rent from time to time at a fair and just amount, to be determined by 
arbitration between the tenant and the landlord, by the courts, or by 
commissioners, or by some means, whereby the tenant shall have as 
fair a representation as the landlord. 

It is demanded that the law be changed forfeiting an outgoing 
tenants improvements to the landlord, and that there be substituted 
for it a rule that an outgoing tenant may sell not only his improve- 
ments but his right to occupy the land, and that if the landlord wants 
it he must pay what it will bring like any other man. 

These are the three F's as first demanded, but the demand not being 
quickly granted the people are now adding a fourth F, freedom of 
purchase, that is, not governmental, wholesale expropration, which is 
absurd to talk about, but an absolute right to have the landlord's 
title to any particular land occupied by a tenant, properly valued, in 
cash, with a right in the tenant to pay that sum in instalments for 
twenty-five years or less, if the tenant chooses, with government rate 
of interest, and thereby extinguish the landlord's claim and have done 
with rent forever. To all of these demands a deaf ear is turned 
by the English government. 

In ancient Rome there appeared, one day, a strange, weird woman, 
bearing a number of mysterious looking books. She wasasibyl,aprophet 
of those days. She demanded a great price for the books, the sibylline 
leaves, in which, she said, the fate of Rome was written; that so long as 
these leaves were preserved and owned by the people of Rome all the 
glories therein recorded would be achieved, that year by year as time 
rolled on, the record there inscribed as one of prophecy would be trans- 
muted into one of fact. The authorities listened to the proposition but 



(8$ 

hesitated as to the price. The sibyl retired, bat the next day came again 
ami iu si g] it of the rulers and the now excited citizens, destroyed one 
of the hooks, yet, still demanded the same great price for what re- 
mained. Severa] times was this repeated until at last the people began 
to murmur, and then the authorities yielded and gave the price de- 
manded. Something was saved, but much had been lost never to be 
regained. 

Ireland demanded from England a recognition of rights when she 
could have given in return ample volumes of love, honor, esteem, affec- 
tion, friendship, respect, regard, reciprocal support,community of inter 
est, unity of ambition. Year by year England rejected the demand and 
one by one the books are burning. Love went long ago. How many yet 
remain intact, how many might yet be rescued from the flames I will not 
undertake to say, but the people are beginning to murmur. They have 
demanded fixity of tenure and been refused; fairness of rent, refused; 
freedom of purchase, refused. The)' now in a more formal manner, 
after full deliberation, repeat their demands for all these things com- 
bined. If England, unable to read the writing on the wall still refuse, 
let her prepare to hear a different demand, a demand not for freedom 
qualified as freedom of sale, nor for freedom qualified as freedom of 
purchase but for freedom in the larger sense, freedom unqualified, un- 
restricted, unconditioned, the freedom of national liberty, the only true 
safeguard of individual rights. 

National Liberty 
does not necessarily mean national separation. Ireland had national 
liberty from 1782 to 1800, and demands to have it again. England has 
acknowledged the right of Ireland to make this demand, has.acknowl- 
edged the justice of the claim, and in 1782 deliberately granted it. That 
grant was, in 1800, by fraud, retaken, and now England refuses to undo 
that fraud, urging that the demand is unwise, even as a matter of 
policy for Ireland, because, they claim, its material comfort would not 
be increased thereby, but all such declarations fall flat on Irish ears, 
because, while Irishmen scoff at the declaration, and claim to know 
that it is false, they would demand independence though they believed 
•it to be true. All the sophistry of all the sophists in the world has 
never yet been able to convince anyone with the smallest spark of 



(40 i 

manhood in him that slavery, under the best conditions is to be pre- 
ferred to liberty at its worst. Accepted slavery means despair, and 
despair means death. Liberty means life and hope and courage, and 
with life and hope and liberty, the golden gleams of a possible happy 
future have power to light up the path of even present poverty, toil 
and care, and make of the onward struggle through the worst of 
troubles a hero's glorious march instead of a helots shameless sub- 
mission. England has notoriously failed in governing Ireland from 
Westminster. Let her then undo the fraud of 1800, and allow Ireland 
to govern herself from College Green. This relief was given by the 
act of '82, and Ireland will not be content till the act of '82, with all the 
modern improvements, is restored, giving to Ireland her own Parlia- 
ment again, but, this time, a Parliament representing, not the gar- 
rison of the English pale, but the people of the whole of Ireland. 

There is no particular sanctity about 

The Act of Union. 

It was a fraud from the beginning. The legislative bod}' in Ireland 
which enacted it represented not the Irish people, but only the aristo- 
cratic landlord class. There had been a 'rising' in Ireland in '98. On 
the pretense that there was danger of a re-enactment in Ireland of 
scenes like those which had just transpired in the great Revolution in 
France a bill was introduced in the Irish Commons, at the instigation 
of the English Government, for a union with England, in the alleged 
interest of peace and order, Of course, with such a Parliament, at 
such a time, with such a power behind the bill to press it as the 
strength of the whole British government the act passed with arous- 
ing majority! By no means. In a house of 300 members, it received 
only 105 votes, and was lost in th.it Parliament. 

* Then the Government put forth all its powers- A new election 
was ordered. A corruption fund of more than seven million dollars 
was voted, and the bill signed by the king. Seventy- five thousand 
dollars was known to be the cash price that would be paid for each 
unionist vote in the new parliament. Rank and office were freely used 
for those cases where, by reason of personal independence, a mere 
money bribe was not sufficient. Passing over hundreds of minor of- 
fices granted to friends of members ^104 of them having been given to 



(41) 

one member for his influence;) omitting also many comparatively un- 
important, though -till valuable offices, such as sinecures with salar- 
ies of $2,500 a year and upwards, we lind that there were given and re- 
ceived for votes to carry the act of union, the office of Master of Horse, 
Postmaster Q-eneral, Controller, Master of Ordinance, Crown Solicitor, 
Solicitor General, Attorney General, Receiver General, two Colonial 
Secretaryships, one Under Secretaryship, one Chancellor oftheEx- 
chequer, two Lords of the Treasury, one General in the Army, two 
Bishoprics, five Judgeships, twenty-two Commissionerships, Revenue, 
Bankruptcy, Board of Works, &c, twelve Colonelcies of Regiments, 
four Baronetcies, one Embassy, one English Marquisate, and there are 
only eight of these in all England, and twenty places in the hereditary 
Peerage of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland! Was there 
ever before such bribery offered to a house of three hundred members ? 
No wonder they all voted the bill. Ah ! Stop a moment ! With all 
of this unparalleled corruption, out of a packed house of 300 mem- 
bers this bill received only 158 votes, only 8 votes more than a major- 
ity of the house, and this is the title by which England holds and per- 
secutes Ireland .! These were not the votes of Irish representatives. 
The whole body of members could not be said to, in any sense, repre- 
sent more than one-fifth of the Irish people. These 158 members did 
not represent more than one-half of that, say one-tenth of the whole, 
and at least that proportion of the landlord class were, as their vote 
shows, simply representatives of English families and English capital, 
and some of them were out and out Englishmen, so that it is an abuse 
of language to say that the Irish people ever, by their representatives, 
or otherwise, agreed to the Act of Union. 

Do you think there is anything sacred about that act of union? 
Do you think that the position of Ireland as to its union with the 
British Kingdom is anything like that of a state in this Union? Do you 
think an Irishman is guilty of any treason in asking to have the fraud 
of 1800 set aside/ Would it not require almost unexampled benefic- 
ence of government under such a title to obtain from the nations a ver- 
dict condoning the fraud? But look at the way Ireland was acquired 
and then at how she is, not governed but massacred, and say if you can 
that it is not the duty of civilized nations to interpose in behalf of the 
Irish people and save them from annihilation. 



(42) 

Under the pressure of public opinion England in disestablishing 
the Irish Church, repealed a part of the act of 1800. Repeal it all, is 
what Ireland asks. This is her main demand, but, pending that peti- 
tion, there is 

Soine Instant Relief Required. 

With the present demands of the league granted, an Irish tenant 
farmer would be lifted at once from serfhood to freedom; under the pre- 
sent law he is practically chained to the soil. He may leave now if he 
likes. Oh, yes! but he must take nothing with him, Every sod he has 
turned, every drain he has dug. every stone he has carried from the 
field and laid in a wall, every tree he has planted, every house he has 
built, every improvement he has made during an occupancy of ten, 
twenty and often of fifty years represents thought,time and work in the 
past, often the work of a life. To tell him that if he leaves the land 
he must go forth naked of all this, is to make him of necessity cling 
to his possession as he would to his life, for it is doubly his life; it is 
the result of his life in the past, the support of his life in the future. 
Change all this; strike down the infamous law by which the landlord 
takes all these things and see in what a different position yon put the 
tenant. In giving him these things you give in most cases, what to him 
is a fortune, yet you give him not one single thing which he did not 
place there himself. You do not give him the land, and that is the 
only thing there that his labor has not produced. 

But many will say this is 

Communism. 

This is taking the management of the landlord's property out of his 
hands and dividing it up among his tenants. How can you justify any 
such proeeeding as that? Is it not true that a man's property is his 
own, to do as he likes with it? If you are going to interfere with men's 
contracts and say that the landlord shall not claim this, and the tenant 
shall not promise that we may as well give up law altogether. Well! 
let us look at that a little. You know lawyers always think there are 
two sides to every question, and it has even been said of them that 
they are like uneasy sleepers, that they lie Hrst on one side and then 
on the other, but let us look on both sides of this question not for the 
purpose of trying to yield any particular meed of justice to the land- 



(43) 

lord, for there is no need of that, fie has all hia rights now. What is 
neededia to make him give up some of the righta he is holding which 
belong to others. 

Acknowledgement?. 

And here while speaking of Irish landlords I wish to say, what it 
onghl noi lie necesaary to say, that of course we all recognize that 
when we speak of" them and their conduct we acknowledge all the ex- 
ceptions. It is not a very large acknowledgement to make, in point of 
numbers, bnt to find even one in a district is as grateful to the heart 
of the Irish tenant as the sight of even a single star through the black 
pall of night is to the tempest-tossed mariner. We know that even 
among Irish landlords there are cases, few alas, but still existing, even 
among those alien in race and religion, where there is not only justice, 
but mercy, and not only mercy but charity, charity as sweet and loving 
as ever glorified humanity, * God bless and prosper them for it. We 
know too that even among those who by blood and faith should be 
just and gentle, the hardest of the hard are found. I do not like to 
mention names, bnt we all know who it was that finding even the 
willing hands of skillful agents too slow in unroofing tenant houses, 
devised and applied machinery to do the hellish work. 

Another thing I perhaps ought to say. We are appealing to Ameri- 
cans to sympathize with ns in this contest. They may think we are 
sometimes a little intemperate in our manner of expression; that we 
do not present our case in the calm, philosophic manner with which 
Englishmen claim their attention. Should this be so we must ask them 
to remember that Englishmen are phlegmatic by nature; they are suf- 
fering no grievance in this matte]-; they are in possession and desire 
peace; they wish to disarm criticism and of course they assume a bland, 
persuasive tone, as guilty people, generally do, when called upon to 
explain their conduct. Also that the Celtic mind is naturally more 
fervid in expression than the Saxon, even upon indifferent matters, but, 
in this matter, we are being crushed to death, and if we cry out some- 
what loudly, there is good reason for it. 

Qualified Rights. 

Let us look now, at this claim of absolute right to the land. The 
landlord claims that he has a light to do what he pleases with his own. 



(44) 

I concede him that, The mistake he makes is as to what is his 
own. He thinks he owns the land absolutely. That is a 
mistake. The value of the land now fanned in Ireland is 
fifteen hundred million dollars. A dozen men of the wealth of some 
citizens of New York could at once buy it all. Suppose they should, 
do so. They would own it then, as the word 'own' is commonly used, 
and by a much better title than rniny of the present proprietors. A man 
may do what he likes with his own. Suppose these gentlemen, if they 
were so minded, could afford to keep the island solely for a hunting 
ground. They would have the right then, I suppose, to say to the five 
million Irish people there: — " We have bought this ground and would 
like to have the use of it; you will please vacate the premises; get off 
the island altogether; we don't propose to farm it here any more, and 
don't want any of you here." And they would have the further right, I 
suppose to call for a coercion act to put them in possession. They 
could not do this you say. Do you mean simply that they could not 
do it in fact, or that they would not have the right to doit? I think 
you will have to say that they would not have the right. Then it must 
be that the occupants of the soil have some right to remain there, and 
that, therefore, a man cannot acquire the same right in land that he 
may have in some other things All absolute rights come from God, 
and from Him alone. God made the earth, and then made men to live 
on it, and they have a Divine right to live on it, w T herever He in His 
wisdom placed them. He not only gave them the right to live on if, but 
one of the most solemn commands He has given them is that they shall 
live on it, and not only live on it, but increase and multiply there. 
What are called rights in land, as to purchase, are merely privileges , 
granted by society for thegood of all, to encourage economy, prudence 
and industry, but society can in no way grant to any man such a right 
in land as will prevent other people from living. There are certain 
things which God does not give a man the right to grant to another, 
such as life, liberty and honor. Any contract by which he undertakes 
to do that is void by Divine law Also, society itself, has declared that 
there are a great many contracts void by human law. As, if you had 
not free will in contracting, if }^ou were at the time under age, or intoxi- 
cated, or insane; or generally, if }^ou were a married woman; or if you 
were deceived in the matter, or made a mistake in a certain sense; or 



(45) 

an agreement to work for another for an indefinite time; or to not 
marry; or to not enforce your lega] rights; or to sell land, unless the 
contract is in writing; or to not claim the statute of limitations. In 
some places women's contracts to work in mines or factories or fields 
cannot be enforced, also, as to contracts made on Sunday, and so on, 
in other words ii is not the law, thai people are always bound by what- 
ever contract they make. Also.it is not the law that owners of land 
have an absolute right to do what they please with it, to, under every 
circumstanci . rent it to whom they please, or on what terms they please 
and for such time as they please The law frequently interferes with 
owners of mines and says, yen shall not work them as you please, but 
as 'the law thinks proper; therefore regulations are made to proteel the 
workers against the greed of the owners. The law has the same right 
to interfere in the matter of contracts between landlord and tenant; 
that is. it has a right to interfere when the interests of humanity or the 
good of society demand it. When in any society a large class of peo- 
ple is in constant danger of being starved to death, solely because of 
unjust land laws, then it is the right and the duty of society to change 
those laws, and step in between the landlord and tenant, and fix what 
shall be a. proper rent for the land. Land is simply capital, bringing 
;i cmtain interest annually in the way of rent. Do not all legislatures 
everywhere iix what interest capital shall have annually, when the 
capita] exists in the shape of money? Why may thej^ not do the same, 
with greater right when it exists in the shape of land! I am speaking 
now- entirely from the stand point of the only law which the landlords 
themselves recognize in the matter, and by that very law there is a 
perfect right to limit their control of the land just so far as the good, 
nol o) ;i certain clash alone, but of the whole, as a whole, requires. The 
Stale has a legal righl to condemn the title to any particular land when- 
ever ir is needed for the public good. It is done in our own States every 
day. for highways, railroads, canals, streets, parks, and soon; the 
only quest ion being: — •"lias a proper occasion arisen for the exercise of 
the p >wer?" The whole world outside of a handful of land monopolists 
in England is fully convinced that it is the duty of the legislature to re- 
model the land law of [reiand so as to give the farmers a chance to live. 
England* anxious for any excusefor refusing todojusticeto [relandsays:- 



(46) 

" Suppose we do give relief to the three million farmers; that does not 
provide for the three million laborers, therefore your plan is incomplete 
and must be rejected." We answer, give us our own parliament and 
we'll take care of our own people. We'll consent to emigration when 
we know that by so doing we are not strengthening the hand that 
smites us. 

How to Get Relief. 

Having, as I hope, shown that it is the land law of Ireland which 
is the immediate bane of Irish prosperity, and not any inherent de- 
fect in the people themselves, and that the legislature has the right to 
interfere in the matter, the question then comes : '• How can we secure 
this legislation ?" 

We are entitled to use every means in our power to accomplish 
this end. We are bound, of course, to begin with a simple demand. If 
that is refused, we may then proceed with more and more earnestness 
until we come to the point where all means short of force are exhausted. 
If that is needed, we may then use force to any extent required, even 
to that of sweeping out of existence all who bar the way to our just 
demands. 

If the people who are suffering from the land law I have described 
were in a free country, or under a Just government, the matter of ob- 
taining relief would be easy enough, but it is a demand of Ireland from 
England, and we all know what that means. England is to Ireland as 
a strong man to another whom he has first felled by a foul blow, then 
bound and robbed, yet who by circumstances are compelled to remain 
in the presence of each other. The brutal bully fears to loose the 
bonds. It is not a necessity of the role of the conqueror. Rome con- 
quered nations, and lived with them in peace, but Rome fought with 
honor and ruled with justice. England does neither. For Ireland to 
obtain jnstice from England, an almost superhuman effort is necessary. 
The first thing, of course, is for the Irish people in Ireland to be de- 
termined iu the matter. I think we may rest easy as to that part of 
the work. It is conceded by all that the people of Ireland never made 
a grander effort for their rights than they are now making. The en- 
thusiasm of the repeal days of the great O'Connell was not greater 
than now obtains in Ireland, and there is a spirit of courageous hope- 



47 I 

fnlness and determined resolution animating the Irish people in tin's 
struggle beyond anything ever known before. Remember that in O'- 
Oonnell's time the people were still wearing the chains ofthepenal 
laws. Remember thai for fifty years now they have enjoyed personal 
liberty, that young Ireland is educated and half Americanized, that it 
reads, reflects and thinks, and you know thai when the people think 
tyants tremble, rreland will do its duty at home, of that you may be 
assured. The nexl thing is for her sons to do their duty abroad. We 
in this great land of America have a double task before us. We must 
first give of our means to carry on the contest at home. That is the 
least of our duties. Our greatest duty is to enlist in our behalf the 
I tower of 

The Great American Nation. 
When I say it is our duty to enlist this power in our behalf, I do 
not mean alone its moral power; that, thank God, we already possess. 
The long roll of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, whose Legis- 
latures have lifted their voices in our behalf shows that the sympathy 
of the American people is with us in this movement. It furnishes a 
crushing reply to the mouthings of that British Judge who taunted the 
'•Traversers' 1 with the declaration that their poliej 7 had no support in 
this country. But we need more than this. We need a declaration 
from the general government, and that declaration, backed b} T the 
naval and military power of this country if necessary. England cannot 
object to this as improper interference in her domestic affairs. Eng- 
land has often interfered in the domestic affairs of European nations in 
the alleged interest of humanity, that great numbers of people were 
being unjustly and harshly dealt with. Ireland has a right now to 
ask a similar interference in its behalf by the United States. She has 
a right to expect that if all else fail, America will stretch forth its hand 
to help her. Nothing is better established than 

Ireland's Claims Upon America. 

Nine hundred years before Columbus pointed his caravels west- 
ward tin' Irish sailor St. Brendan had reported the discovery of a great 
land across the Atlantic. The Norsemen knew of it and called it 
Trland if Mi'kla, the greater Ireland. The Italian geographers knew of 
it. and Toscanelli, on the map which was prepared expressly for the 



(48) 

lirsi voyage of Columbus, marked it "terra di San Borondon," St. 
Brendan's land; and it is recorded that the first of Columbus' sailors 
who set Tool upon the new world was named Patrick Maguire. More 
Irishmen followed. In L649 45,000 came, driven out of Ireland by the 
Cromwellian persecutions. In L689 an Irish colony came to Mary- 
land, among them the Carol! family, which gave the celebrated signer 
of the declaration of American [ndependence,Charles Caro]l,ofCarollton. 
In 1698 they colonized North Carolina, and, in seven years after, one 
of their number, Mr. -lames Moore, led the people in revolt against the 
oppressions of the proprietary government, established their inde- 
pendence, and was honored by the people in being elected Governor, 
the first people's Governor of North Carolina. 

In 1699 a Large Irish emigration came to Pennsylvania, whichgave 
to America many of the leaders in the movement lor American hide 
pendence. In 1710 they came to Virginia and established there the 
McDonnells, Breckenridges, McDuffies, Magruders and McKennas of 
that State. 

In 1729, at Philadelphia the Irish arrivals outnumbered ten to one 
all others from Europe oombined. In l~iW they came also to Cape 
Cod; with them Charles (Minion and family from which came De Witt 
Clinton of New York. 

In 17;>7 they colonized South Carolina and gave to this country 
Rutl edge, Calhoun and later Andrew Jackson, that "old Hickory,'' 
Andrew Jackson whom yon know some folks are voting for yet for pre- 
sident. One of the early South Carolina historians said that: " Of all 
other countries none has furnished the province with so many inhabit- 
ants as Ireland." 

In L746, they went in great numbers with Boone and settled Ken- 
tucky and the most popular soldier in that land in the early days was 
Major Hugh McGrady. 

From the earliest days they hat' been settling in all the other 
States. Victims all of them, in a strictly personal sense, of English 
injustice-, you may imagine they were foremost and loudest in the call 
for American Independence. It is admitted that the Irish John Rutledge 
" was the first man whose eloquence roused South Carolina to the level 
of resistance." When the Stamp Act was passed. Dr. Franklin, com- 



(49) 

municating from London with Charles Thompson, one of the Irish 
sen lets 'm Pennsylvania, afterward secretary of the Continental Con- 
gress, wrote: " The sun of liberty is set. The Americans must light 
now the lamps of industry and economy," hut Thompson, like a 
genuine Celt sent back the ringing answer: ''Be. assured that wa 
shall light torches of quite a different sort. 1 ' John Hancock whose 
magnificent autograph marshals the signatures to the declaration like 
a standard bearer at the head of a column was the son of Honora 
O'Flafcerty and his people were lords in Gal way for centuries before 
their advent in America. 

Ireland w;is well represented in the Continental Congress, and 
among the signers of the Declaration of Independence as well as the 
Constitution of the United States. 

One sixth of the signers of the declaration and one-sixth of the 
signers of the Constitution that we know of were Irishmen. 

I have led 3011 one by one through all these facts that you may 
be the better prepared for the more astonishing declaration I am about 
to make. 

Of the Continental army which achieved the Independence of 
United States, one third of the active officers and one half of the 
rank and file, were of Irish birth or immediate Irish descent. 

One of the lirstBrigadier Generals of the Continental army was Gen. 
Sullivan an Irishman, son of a Limerick schoolmaster. Another was 
Richard Montgomery of New York, an Irishman. The celebrated Mad 
Anthony Wayne, so famous as the Murat of the American army was an 
Irishman. The man who, answering Washington's anxious inquiry as 
to whether it was possible to capture a certain fort, said, "* I'll take it 
to night or Molly Stark will be a widow in the morning,"' was Major- 
general John Stark, ;in Irishman from Londonderry. I need not tell 
you that he "held the fort." I could tell you of Hand, Moylan, 
Dillon, and fifty more, but, not now. 

Ireland was represented in the navy too. The first naval capture 
made in the name of the United States, was by O'Brien from Cork. 
Fennimore Cooper, in his history of the navy calls it 'the Lexington 
of the seas; the first blow struck on the water after the war of the revo- 
lution had actually commenced." The first Commodore of the Ameri- 



(50) 

can navy was John Barry from Wexford, where he lived almost to 
manhood before lie came to America. One of Barry's proteges in the 
navy was a young Irishman, who afterwards became Admiral Stewart, 
whose grandson Stewart Parnell is not unknown to you. 

Washington not only understood the composition of his army but 
fully appreciated the loyalty of his Irish troops. When that terrible 
night came, when everything depended on the fidelity of the sentries, 
he issued the celebrated order, " Put none but Irish or Americans on 
guard to night." And he put the Irish first, where they are generally 
found when there is any fighting to be done. Some so called his- 
torians have been base enough to drop the word "Irish 1 ' in quoting 
this order, but the original is still preserved in Washington and stands 
there as one of the grandest compliments ever paid to the Irish nice. 

Nor was it in America alone that the Irish race answered the call 
for aid. The Irish brigade in the service of France, sought and obiain- 
ed permission to tight the English in America, and, on Southern battle 
fields shed their blood in behalf of American liberty as freely as did 
their brethren in the North. Ireland had her own parliament at 
Dublin then, and though sitting almost within the range of English 
guns, its House of Commons not only refused to vote the 45,000 men de- 
manded to fight against America, but, with characteristic Irish auda- 
city, passed Mr. Daly's resolution calling upon the King to discontinue 
the war. 

In the English Parliament, bearding the lion in his den, the Irish 
orators Bane, Burke and Sheridan plead for American freedom in 
words of such magnificent eloquence that they are handed down from 
generation to generation in the school books of this land as the grand- 
est utterances ever delivered in behalf of American liberty. 

Of course we boast of all this. Why should we not? Is it not 
something for Irishmen to be proud of that American patriotism was- 
roused in great part by Irish eloquence, American liberty proclaimed 
in great part by Irish representatives and American independence 
achieved in great part by Irish arms? 

So much importance did America at one time attach to the Irish 
people that the first continental congress sent an address to them, not 
to Irishmen in America, no appeal to them was necessary, but to the- 



(5-1) 

Trisli people in Ireland, explaining to them tli.at America had no hos- 
tility to Ireland itself, but only to England. 

Franklin while on his diplomatic mission to Europe, visited Ire- 
land to obtain the sympathy of the Irish people, and reported from 
London, saying: — "I found them disposed to be friends of America, in 
which 1 endeavored to confirm them, with the expectation that our 
growing weight, might in time be thrown into their scale, and Ivy join- 
ing our interests with theirs a more equitable treatment from this nation 
(England) might be obtained for them, as well as for us." 

I could go on for hours yet citing the services rendered by Irish- 
men to America, but I think I may stop with this. Ireland accepted 
the pledge of America and declared itself for American independence. 
England was obliged to recognize the American Parliament, but she 
glutted her vengeance on Ireland. She quickly destroyed the Irish 
Parliament, and did her best to destroy the Irish people, Ireland from 
the depths of her dungeon, loaded with chains, send now her " address" 
to America. She has no fear as to the manner of its reception. She 
presents it not with the nervous dread of an alien suppliant, but with 
the proud humility of an unfortunate companion in arms, appealing to 
the generosity of a former comrade to whom fortune has been kinder 
in the distribution of her favors. 

Alliances. 

We have a right then to appeal to America, and oh! My brothers, 
in this struggle, let us be careful where we seek for aid. After the 
mercy of God, the justice of our cause and the valor of our race, let us 
put our trust in this gallant land of freedom, closing our ears to the 
whisperings of that dark, malignant power which is corrupting the 
suffering people of every land in Europe, Aye! even our own. 

Let us put our trust in this great American nation, whose land we 
were the first to discover; whose soil we were among the first to pos- 
sess; whose liberty we were among the first to proclaim ; whose inde- 
pendence we were among the first to achieve; whose constitution we 
were among the first to form, and whose union, our Corcorans and 
Meaghers and Shields and Sheridans, with half a million Irish soldiers 
at their backs, were among the foremost to preserve. 

Let us remember that when the sun of the Roman Empire went 



(52) 

down in barbarian darkness it was our land that held aloft the beacon 
light of knowledge, civilization, refinement, eloquence, poetry and art, 
all crowned with the supernatural glory of the christian faith, and that 
as sons of that glorious land it is our duty to watch with jealous care 
that the shining splendor of that ancient record receive, now, no blot or 
blemish. 

Let us, in even these terrible days, show to the w r orld that the 
Irish race, christianized by St. Patrick, victorious under Brian of the 
tributes, grandly belligerent under its mediaeval chiefs, electrified with 
the heroism of its Wolf-Tone's, Sarsfield's and Emmets: effulgent with 
the eloquence of itsGrattan's andBurke's,itsLalor-Shields and Brinsley 
Sheridans; ennobled by the achievements of its later representatives 
in every quarter of the globe; though besieged with temptation, wasted 
by famine, blasted by war, crushed by oppression is still worthy of its 
ancient name and holds itself now, as of old, proudly above all contact 
with dishonor. 

We cannot descend to the commune. The hand which tor ages 
past knew so well how to wield the hero's sword, cannot stoop now to 
clutch the torch of the petroleuse. True, with us now, all is lost but 
honor, but 

With Honor Saved all May Yet be Won. 

The haughty English lords laugh at such words. They point to 
their massive forts, that threaten every land; to their iron ships, which 
darken every sea,* and cry: "Lo! we are here. We, the powerful. 
Who shall withstand us!" So spake the pride of Tyre, exclaiming; 
i; I am God, and sit in the chair of God, in the heart of the sea/' Yet 
she became "a spoil of the nations; the dust was scraped from her, and 
she was made like a smooth rock, a drying place for nets in the midst 
of the sea." So spoke the pride of Greece in the age of Pericles, yet 
her palaces became desolate. So thought the lords of Carthage, yet 
her market places were turned to wastes of sand. So sang the poets- 
of the Augustan age, yet the Rome of the Caesars lives only in ruins- 
So discoursed the haughty Moors, in choicest Arabic as the they 
sauntered through the gilded courts of the Alhambra with a half pity- 
ing smile for the ragged refugees starving in the Asturias after seven 
hundred years of fruitless war, yet, of the haughty Moors and their 



(53 j 

Spanish domination, nothing bnt a faded memory now remains, while 
the sons of the once Astnrian exiles are now lords of Spain, and, for 
four hundred years, have not only proudly waved the nag of Castile 
overall the land of the < 1 id, but have borne it with honor and glory to 
every quarter of the globe. 

The Celts of Ireland and the Celts of Spain are both thorough-bred 
descendant "I' the old Aryan stock, the conquering blood of the world? 
and Irish independence, though long delayed, is nevertheless an ever 
living thought of the Irish people. It is an idea old as the Irish race 
and broad as the flow of Irish blood; a principle as undying with 
them as tin? love they bear their faith, as uncompromising as the care 
with which they guard their honor, as immortal as the genius which 
is the birthright of their race. They do well to ever and evermore 
assert it, for so surely as the stars keep to their courses so surely will 
their day of triumph come. 

Men are now living who saw them possess it; men are now living 
who will see them regain it. The defeat of to-day but binds them closer 
for the victory of to-morrow. They have proved themselves indestructi- 
ble. Firmly planted on the principle of independence they cannot but 
be invincible. 

They must demand the act of '82. It is their only policy, their 
only refuge, their only hope, and hoping in this they will not hope in 
vain. 

" It' a Stale submit 
A i once, Bhe may be blotted out at once 
Ami swallowed in the conqueror's chronicle. 
Whereas, in wars of freedom and defense, 
The glory and the grief of battle, won or lost, 
Solders a race together. Yea! though they fail, 
The names of those who fought ami fell, are like 
A banked up fire, that Hashes mil again 
Century after century, and, at last, 
Will lead them on to victory, 
[.ike phantoms of the Gods." 

The year L883 will be the hundredth anniversary of the signing 
of the treaty recognizing American Independence. If America will but 
give to Ireland now, half the aid which Ireland and Irishmen extended 
here in American troubles, theyeai 1883 will see Ireland also entering 



(54) 

on the second centenary of her national liberty. 

Other events may clevelope before '83. The watch-fires of a general 
revolution are already lighted in Europe. The Communists in France, 
the Irredentists in Italy, the Intransigentes in Spain, the Socialists in 
German};-, the Nihilists in Russia and the Internationals ever} 7 where 
are passing torches from hand to hand through the powder magazines 
of European monarchies. Why are these torches not already lighted? 
Because the workers are waiting to so perfect their arrangements that 
when the word is given, every aristocratic government in Europe may 
be simultaneously exploded in the air. They are waiting now for one 
place only, England. They would not wait for that, if Ireland would 
join them. If England is wise, she will accept Ireland as an ally, be- 
fore it is too late. 

These are not pleasant words with which to leave this subject, but 
the question is a grave one, and the brutal obstinacy of the British 
government threatens to make them the only final words possible in the 
case. They are uttered not in anger but in sorrow, not as a menace 
but a prophecy. 

Ireland will not be saved by the Commune, that is, if the Commune 
be brought in, nothing worth saving will be preserved, but, if the lie- 
land of history cannot be saved, then the thing which, in such case, 
will lie next to that desire in Irish hearts will happen — England will be 
destroyed. 

There is no such wish, of itself alone, now in Irish hearts. The 
Irish blood is of the bright red. heroic tinct. There is not a drop 
of the black Angevin poison in it. When the Irish chieftain who 
conquered at Waterloo was sounded by the darker blooded sover- 
eigns as to the propriet^v of disposing of Napoleon, you know what his 
answer was: — " If they want to kill Napoleon let them hire an execu- 
tioner." He was a soldier, not a headsman ! That is the kind of blood 
that runs in Irish veins. Let England be, even now, honest, fair and 
just with Ireland, restoring the rights now so unjustly withheld, and 
she will find that Ireland will be willing to look to the future, not 
to the past, but if no future is permitted to her, then we know what 
to expect. 

England did not give Ireland independence in 1782. SIk j merely 
recognized the justice of what Ireland always claimed, that she was 



(55) 

by right and ought to be in Pact free and independent, and would 
thenceforth be soregarded. If that was true and right and proper in 

17m'. ii iiiusi be equally so in L8S2. 

It seems to me that is the strongest way to put the case of Ireland 
to the nations, and to the people of the world. It requires less ex- 
planation, less argument, less examination than any other proposition. 
It shows that the matter was debated, considered, and agreed to by 
England herself; all that remains is to enforce the agreement. The 
fraud of L800 is not to be spoken of except to be condemned. This is 
not a demand for Home Rule on a policy of expediency, convenience 
and despatch of business merely. A demand of that kind is n mattsr 
of domestic policy with which the nations of the world have but little 
to do. The demand of Ireland is a demand for National Independ- 
ent not a grant of independence as a matter of right, for Ireland has 
that now. but a demand for independence in fact where it already ex- 
istsof right. This is a demand based not on policy but on principle, 
a principle which goes to the very foundation of all national existence 
and involves the inherent rights of all organized peoples. Put the de- 
mand for Irish Independence on that basis, the on]y true and proper 
basis on which to put it, and you at once compel the nations of the 
earth to, in self defence, recognize the justice of the claim, and fur- 
nish them with a legitimate basis for intervention, if intervention he 
found necessary or expedient, and so, no matter what detour we make, 
we comeback ever to the idea dominant in the mind of our gallant 
Kmmet in his dying words. " When my country shall have taken her 
place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my 
epitaph be written.*' 

The Irish people are impatient to write that epitaph. It remains 
for the persons who control the legislation of England to determine 
whether it shall be written with the pen or carved by the sword, for 
the Irish people insist it shall lie written though in letters of 
blood. Emmet shed every drop of his blood in behalf of Irish inde 
pendence. The Irish people owe him blood in return, if need be, to 
win tlie prize tiny sacrificed his life to gain. That is a debt the inter 
est of which is accumulating every day that payment is delayed. 
Wherefore, again it becomes apparent, that if England is wise, she 
will conciliate Ireland, before it is too LATE, 



18 



